y and his
indomitable spirit came back, filling my mind with pictures of his swift
and graceful use of axe and scythe, and when I spoke of the early days,
he found it difficult to reply--they were so beautiful in retrospect.

The next day was Sunday, and Sunday afternoon was for him a period of
musing, an hour of dream, and as night began to fall he turned to me and
with familiar accent called out, "Come, Hamlin, sing some of the songs
your mother used to love," and I complied, although I could play but a
crude accompaniment to my voice. First of all I sang "Rise and Shine"
and "The Sweet Story of Old" in acknowledgment of the Sabbath, then
passed to "The Old Musician and His Harp," ending with "When You and I
Were Young, Maggie," in which I discerned a darker significance--a
deeper pathos than ever before. It had now a personal, poignant
application.

Tears misted his eyes as I uttered the line, "But now we are aged and
gray, Maggie, the trials of life are nearly done," and at the close he
was silent with emotion. He, too, was aged and gray, his trials of life
nearly done, and the one who had been his solace and his stay had passed
beyond recall.

To me, came the insistent thought, "Soon he must go to join Mother in
the little plot under the pines beyond Neshonoc." In spite of my
philosophy, I imagined their reunion somehow, somewhere.

Tender and sweet were the scenes which the words of my songs
evoked--pictures which had nothing to do with the music except by
association, forms and faces of far-off days, of Dry Run Prairie and its
neighbors, and of the still farther and dimmer and more magical
experiences of Green's Coulee, before the call to war.

I sang the song my uncle Bailey loved. A song which took him back to his
boyhood's home in Maine.

"The river's running just the same,
The willows on its side
Are larger than they were, dear Tom,
The stream appears less wide,
And stooping down to take a drink,
Dear Heart, I started so,
To see how sadly I was changed
Since forty years ago!"

His songs, his friends, his thoughts were all of the past except when
they dwelt on his grandchildren--and they, after six months' absence,
were shadowy, fairy-like forms in his memory. He found it difficult to
recall them precisely. He longed for them but his longing was for
something vaguely bright and cheerful and tender. David and William and
Susan and Belle were much more vividly real to