r driver. There was a little flag in the whip-socket
before him, which flapped gayly in the breeze. It was such a long time
since he had been seen out-of-doors that everybody found him a great
object of interest, and paid him much attention. Even those who were
tired of being asked to contribute to his support, who resented the
fact of his having a helpless wife and great family; who always
insisted that with his little pension and hopeless lameness, his
fingerless left hand and failing sight, he could support himself and
his household if he chose,--even those persons came forward now to
greet him handsomely and with large approval. To be sure, he enjoyed
the conversation of idlers, and his wife had a complaining way that
was the same as begging, especially since her boys began to grow up
and be of some use; and there were one or two near neighbors who never
let them really want; so other people, who had cares enough of their
own, could excuse themselves for forgetting him the year round, and
even call him shiftless. But there were none to look askance at Martin
Tighe on Decoration Day, as he sat in the wagon, with his bleached
face like a captive's, and his thin, afflicted body. He stretched out
his whole hand impartially to those who had remembered and those who
had forgotten both his courage at Fredericksburg and his sorry need in
Barlow.

Henry Merrill had secured the engine company's large flag in Alton,
and now carried it proudly. There were eight men in line, two by two,
and marching a good bit apart, to make their line the longer. The fife
and drum struck up gallantly together, and the little procession moved
away slowly along the country road. It gave an unwonted touch of color
to the landscape,--the scarlet, the blue, between the new-ploughed
fields and budding roadside thickets, between the wide dim ranges of
the mountains, under the great white clouds of the spring sky. Such
processions grow more pathetic year by year; it will not be so long
now before wondering children will have seen the last. The aging faces
of the men, the renewed comradeship, the quick beat of the hearts that
remember, the tenderness of those who think upon old sorrows,--all
these make the day a lovelier and a sadder festival. So men's hearts
were stirred, they knew not why, when they heard the shrill fife and
the incessant drum along the quiet Barlow road, and saw the handful of
old soldiers marching by. Nobody thought of them as famil