nt of the Grand Army of the
Republic,--that it was a fine morning in September. Of course John
Barclay contributed the band. He afterwards confessed to that,
explaining that Nellie had told him that Watts never had received the
attention he should receive either in the town or the state or the
nation, and so long as Watts was a National Delegate for the first
time in his life, and so long as she had twice been voted for as
National President of the Ladies' Aid, and might get it this time, the
band would be, as she put it, "so nice to take along"; and as John
never forgot the fact that Nellie asked him to sing at her wedding, he
hired the band. Thus are we bound to our past. But the band was not
what caused the comrades to gasp, though its going was a surprise. And
when they heard it turn into Main Street far up by Lincoln Avenue,
playing the good old tune that the town loved for Watts' sake and for
the sake of the time and the place and the heroic deeds it
celebrated,--when they heard the band, the colonel asked the general,
"Where's Watts?" and they suspected that the band might be bringing
him to the depot.

Heaven knows the town had bought uniforms and new horns for the band
often enough for it to do something public-spirited once in a while
without being paid for it. So the band did not come to the town as a
shock in and of itself. Neither for that matter did the hack--the new
glistening silver-mounted hack, with the bright spick-and-span hearse
harness on the horses; in those bustling days a quarter was nothing,
and you can ride all over the Ridge for a quarter; so when the
comrades at the depot, in their blue soldiers' clothes their campaign
hats, and their delegates' badges, saw the band followed by the hack,
they were of course interested, but that was all. And when some of the
far-sighted ones observed that the top of the hack was spread back
royally, they commented upon the display of pomp, but the comment was
not extraordinary. But when from the street as the band stopped, there
came cheers from the people, the boys at the station felt that
something unusual was about to come to them. So they watched the band
march down the long sheet-iron-covered station walk, and the hack move
along beside the band boys; and the poet's comrades-in-arms saw him
sitting beside the poet's wife,--the two in solemn state. And then
the old boys beheld Watts McHurdie,--little Watts McHurdie, with his
grizzled beard combed, with h