pen's back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall
stein with some bitterness of certain especially grievous misstatements
of plain fact on the part of certain faulty-minded comrades. In reply
Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:

"Say, then, Jacob, why don't you yourself write a piece to the paper
telling about this regiment of yours--the way it was?"

"I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail," he had said, the ambition
of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at
the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried
and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he
had been--yes, none better--and a good citizen, and in his day a capable
and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his
own story. That morning, when the youngest grandchild slept and his
daughter and his daughter's husband and the brood of his older
grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he
sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words
would not come--or, at least, after the first line or two they would not
come.

The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on
his two good legs--both good legs then--to fight for the country whose
language he could not yet speak was there in bright and living colors;
but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In
the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified
to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded
over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right
then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as
you might say from the clear sky, a great idea--an idea so magnificent
that he almost dropped the youngest Miss Engel off his lap at the
splendid shock of it.

With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle
of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the sudden jostle the young lady
slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very
carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and
down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that
stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal
steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which
was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmos