was one of the darkest moments of
her life and if you think about it you will understand the reason why.
My sister was only five years old, I was three and Frank was a babe in
the cradle. Broken hearted at the thought of the long separation, and
scared by visions of battle my mother begged the soldier not to go; but
he was of the stern stuff which makes patriots--and besides his name was
already on the roll, therefore he went away to join Grant's army at
Vicksburg. "What sacrifice! What folly!" said his pacifist
neighbors--"to leave your wife and children for an idea, a mere
sentiment; to put your life in peril for a striped silken rag." But he
went. For thirteen dollars a month he marched and fought while his plow
rusted in the shed and his cattle called to him from their stalls.

My conscious memory holds nothing of my mother's agony of waiting,
nothing of the dark days when the baby was ill and the doctor far
away--but into my subconscious ear her voice sank, and the words
_Grant_, _Lincoln_, _Sherman_, "_furlough_," "_mustered out_," ring like
bells, deep-toned and vibrant. I shared dimly in every emotional
utterance of the neighbors who came to call and a large part of what I
am is due to the impressions of these deeply passionate and poetic
years.

Dim pictures come to me. I see my mother at the spinning wheel, I help
her fill the candle molds. I hold in my hands the queer carding combs
with their crinkly teeth, but my first definite connected recollection
is the scene of my father's return at the close of the war.

I was not quite five years old, and the events of that day are so
commingled with later impressions,--experiences which came long
after--that I cannot be quite sure which are true and which imagined,
but the picture as a whole is very vivid and very complete.

Thus it happened that my first impressions of life were martial, and my
training military, for my father brought back from his two years'
campaigning under Sherman and Thomas the temper and the habit of a
soldier.

He became naturally the dominant figure in my horizon, and his scheme of
discipline impressed itself almost at once upon his children.

I suspect that we had fallen into rather free and easy habits under
mother's government, for she was too jolly, too tender-hearted, to
engender fear in us even when she threatened us with a switch or a
shingle. We soon learned, however, that the soldier's promise of
punishment was swift and pre