She sang it to the cheerful tune of Hinton, as oft before when Parson Page had given it out from the pulpit of Goshen church, and she and Abram sat side by side singing from the weather-beaten hymnal that lay now near the Bible on the centre-table. I took it up and turned its yellow pages, wondering at the queer "buckwheat" notes and reading the names of the old church music, "Federal Street," whose tones beat the air like the wing of a tired and home-sick angel; "Windham," that holds in its minor strains the melancholy wails of an autumn wind; "Brattle Street," whose rich full chords are like a confession of faith,--all those old tunes that have grown richer and sweeter by carrying heavenward on the wings of song the devotion of worshipping souls. Suddenly Aunt Jane's voice ceased in the middle of a word. I looked up. She was sitting motionless, holding in her hand a piece of rusty iron and gazing at it with tragic eyes. As she gazed, that which had been its sheath fell from it in flakes, and there before us, wasted to half its size by the dampness of years, was the dull ghost of a bayonet that once had glittered in the sun's rays on many a southern battle field. "It's that old bayonet," she said, slowly and sadly. "I ricollect the day Abram plowed it up and brought it to the house. The soldiers camped all around our place durin' the war, and to this day you can't run a furrow without turnin' up a minie-ball or an old canteen or somethin' o' the sort to carry you back to war times and make your heart ache for days to come." She ran her finger slowly down the bayonet, laying it against the point, while the lines in her face deepened under the shadow of bitter memories. "To think," she said at last, "that human bein's made in the image o' God, men and brothers, would make a thing like this to use against each other! The longer I live, child, the stranger that war seems to me. I couldn't understand it before it come nor while it was goin' on, and now, after all these years, it's jest as mysterious as it ever was. You know it begun in the spring, the war did, and there's a certain kind o' spring wind and the way the air smells that takes me back to the day when the news come to Goshen that Fort Sumter'd been fired on; and if I was to live to be as old as Methuselah, I don't reckon there'd ever be a spring that wouldn't bring back the spring of '61.