he old farm 'long o' father, an' I've
made it bounce. Look at them old meadows an' see the herd's grass that
come off of 'em last year! I ain't ashamed o' my place now, if I did
go to the war."

"It all looks a sight bigger to me now than it did then," said Henry
Merrill. "Our goin' to the war, I refer to. We didn't sense it no more
than other folks did. I used to be sick o' hearin' their stuff about
patriotism and lovin' your country, an' them pieces o' poetry women
folks wrote for the papers on the old flag, an' our fallen heroes, an'
them things; they didn't seem to strike me in the right place; but I
tell ye it kind o' starts me now every time I come on the flag
sudden,--it does so. A spell ago--'long in the fall, I guess it was--I
was over to Alton, an' there was a fire company paradin'. They'd got
the prize at a fair, an' had just come home on the cars, an' I heard
the band; so I stepped to the front o' the store where me an' my woman
was tradin', an' the company felt well, an' was comin' along the
street 'most as good as troops. I see the old flag a-comin', kind of
blowin' back, an' it went all over me. Somethin' worked round in my
throat; I vow I come near cryin'. I was glad nobody see me."

"I'd go to war again in a minute," declared Stover, after an
expressive pause; "but I expect we should know better what we was
about. I don' know but we've got too many rooted opinions now to make
us the best o' soldiers."

"Martin Tighe an' John Tighe was considerable older than the rest, and
they done well," answered Henry Merrill quickly. "We three was the
youngest of any, but we did think at the time we knew the most."

"Well, whatever you may say, that war give the country a great start,"
said Asa Brown. "I tell ye we just begin to see the scope on't. There
was my cousin, you know, Dan'l Evins, that stopped with us last
winter; he was tellin' me that one o' his coastin' trips he was into
the port o' Beaufort lo'din' with yaller-pine lumber, an' he roved
into an old buryin'-ground there is there, an' he see a stone that had
on it some young Southern fellow's name that was killed in the war,
an' under it was, 'He died for his country.' Dan'l knowed how I used
to feel about them South Car'lina goings on, an' I did feel kind o'
red an' ugly for a minute, an' then somethin' come over me, an' I
says, 'Well, I don' know but what the poor chap did, Dan Evins, when
you come to view it all round.'"

The other men made no an