d her hair as he kissed her, and enjoined on her to remember
that their son was not slain, but by a merciful Providence was only
wounded and might be spared to them. She must thank the Lord and be
ready to nurse him back to life.

Why Providence should be thus merciful to their son rather than to
many another son, the good Elder did not pause to consider. Possibly
he thought it no more than just that the prayers of the righteous
should be answered by a supernatural intervention between their sons
and the bullets of the enemy. His ideas on this point were no doubt
vague at the best, but certain it is that he returned from his long
and difficult journey to the seat of strife after his boy, with a
clearer notion of what war really was, and a more human sympathy for
those who go and suffer, and, as might be anticipated with those of
his temperament, an added bitterness against those whom he felt were
to blame for the conflict.

When Peter Junior left his home, his father had enjoined on him to go,
not in the spirit of bitterness and enmity, but as an act of duty, to
teach a needed lesson; for surely the Lord was on the side of the
right, and was using the men of the North to teach this needed lesson
to those laboring in error. Ah! it is a very different point of view
we take when we suffer, instead of merely moralizing on the suffering
of others; especially we who feel that we know what is right, and lack
in great part the imagination to comprehend the other man's viewpoint.
To us of that cast of mind there is only one viewpoint and that is our
own, and only a bodily departure to the other man's hilltop or valley,
as the case may be, will open the eyes and enlarge the understanding
to the extent of even allowing our fellows to see things in another
light from our own.

In this instance, while the Elder's understanding had been decidedly
enlarged, it had been in but one direction, and the effect had not
been to his spiritual benefit, for he had seen only the suffering of
his own side, and, being deficient in power to imagine what might be,
he had taken no charitable thought for the other side. Instead, a
feeling of hatred had been stirred within him,--a feeling he felt
himself justified in and therefore indulged and named: "Righteous
Indignation."

The Elder's face was stern and hard as he directed the men who bore
his boy on the litter where to turn, and how to lift it above the
banister in going up the stair so as not