hat a regiment was being formed at Big Rapids. Before he had
finished speaking the men on the machine had leaped to the ground and
rushed off to enlist, my brother Jack, who had recently joined us, among
them. In ten minutes not one man was left in the field. A few months
later my brother Tom enlisted as a bugler--he was a mere boy at the
time--and not long after that my father followed the example of his sons
and served until the war was ended. He had entered on the twenty-ninth
of August, 1862, as an army steward; he came back to us with the rank of
lieutenant and assistant surgeon of field and staff.

Between those years I was the principal support of our family, and life
became a strenuous and tragic affair. For months at a time we had no
news from the front. The work in our community, if it was done at all,
was done by despairing women whose hearts were with their men. When care
had become our constant guest, Death entered our home as well. My sister
Eleanor had married, and died in childbirth, leaving her baby to me;
and the blackest hours of those black years were the hours that saw her
passing. I can see her still, lying in a stupor from which she roused
herself at intervals to ask about her child. She insisted that our
brother Tom should name the baby, but Tom was fighting for his country,
unless he had already preceded Eleanor through the wide portal that was
opening before her. I could only tell her that I had written to him; but
before the assurance was an hour old she would climb up from the gulf
of unconsciousness with infinite effort to ask if we had received his
reply. At last, to calm her, I told her it had come, and that Tom had
chosen for her little son the name of Arthur. She smiled at this and
drew a deep breath; then, still smiling, she passed away. Her baby
slipped into her vacant place and almost filled our heavy hearts, but
only for a short time; for within a few months after his mother's death
his father married again and took him from me, and it seemed that with
his going we had lost all that made life worth while.

The problem of living grew harder with everyday. We eked out our little
income in every way we could, taking as boarders the workers in the
logging-camps, making quilts, which we sold, and losing no chance to
earn a penny in any legitimate manner. Again my mother did such outside
sewing as she could secure, yet with every month of our effort the gulf
between our income and our expe