pigeons than ever you saw with your eyes.
Up with Hercules Scott's brigade, just as it came on night--
He was the angel beside me in the thickest of the fight--
Wrote a note to his mother--He said, "I've got to go;
Mother what would home be under the heel of the foe!"
Oh! she never slept a wink, she would rise and walk the floor;
She'd say this over and over, "I knew it all before!"
I'd try to speak of the glory to give her a little joy.
"What is the glory to me when I want my boy, my boy!"
She'd say, and she'd wring her hands; her hair grew white as snow--
And I'd argue with her up and down, to and fro,
Of how she had mothered a hero, and his was a glorious fate,
Better than years of grubbing to gather an estate.
Sometimes I'd put it this way: "If God was to say to me now
'Take him back as he once was helping you with the plow,'
I'd say, 'No, God, thank You kindly; 'twas You that he obeyed;
You told him to fight and he fought, and he wasn't afraid;
You wanted to prove him in battle, You sent him to Lundy's Lane,
'Tis well!" But she only would answer over and over again,
"Give me back my Abner--give me back my son!"
It was so all through the winter until the spring had begun,
And the crocus was up in the dooryard, and the drift by the fence
was thinned,
And the sap drip-dropped from the branches wounded by the wind,
And the whole earth smelled like a flower,--then she came to me one
night--
"Rufus!" she said, with a sob in her throat,--"Rufus, you're right."
I hadn't cried till then, not a tear--but then I was torn in two--
There, it's all right--my eyes don't see as they used to do!

But O the joy of that battle--it was worth the whole of life,
You felt immortal in action with the rapture of the strife,
There in the dark by the river, with the flashes of fire before,
Running and crashing along, there in the dark, and the roar
Of the guns, and the shrilling cheers, and the knowledge that filled
your heart
That there was a victory making and you must do your part,
But--there's his grave in the orchard where the headstone glimmers
white:
We could see it, we thought, from our window even on the darkest
night;
It is set there for a sign that what one lad could do
Would be done by a hundred hundred lads whose hearts were stout and
true.
And when in the time of trial you hear the recreant say,
Shooting his coward lips at us, "You shall have had your day:
For all your state and glory shall pas