t and
smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel
apartment.

The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco
of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against
the plastering, under the one small window set diagonally in a jog in
the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had
been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before
the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and while he
still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.

As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a
little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and
drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its
sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out
of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The
tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalization
papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small
bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath
was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly
folded blue uniform coat, with the G. A. R. bronze showing in its
uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the
corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be
buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom,
and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted--the
one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honorable record, this old
man had brought home from the South. It was a captured Confederate
knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and
the brass C. S. A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the
flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.

The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and
odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking
yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand
corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of
paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the
close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be
made out.

Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom,
put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and
s