oldier in the village that I learned the boy's
story. Lyon was, the old man told me, but fourteen when the first
enlistment occurred, but was even then eager to go. He was in the
court-house square every evening to watch the recruits at their
drill, and when the home company was ordered off he rode into the
city on his pony to see the men board the train and to wave them
good-by. The next year he spent at home with a tutor, but when he
was fifteen he held his parents to their promise and went into the
army. He was color sergeant of his regiment and fell in a charge
upon the breastworks of a fort about a year after his enlistment.

"The veteran showed me an account of this charge which had been
written for the village paper by one of my uncle's comrades who had
seen his part in the engagement. It seems that as his company were
running at full speed across the bottom lands toward the fortified
hill, a shell burst over them. This comrade, running beside my
uncle, saw the colors waver and sink as if falling, and looked to
see that the boy's hand and forearm had been torn away by the
exploding shrapnel. The boy, he thought, did not realize the extent
of his injury, for he laughed, shouted something which his comrade
did not catch, caught the flag in his left hand, and ran on up the
hill. They went splendidly up over the breastworks, but just as my
uncle, his colors flying, reached the top of the embankment, a
second shell carried away his left arm at the arm-pit, and he fell
over the wall with the flag settling about him.

"It was because this story was ever present with me, because I was
unable to shake it off, that I began to read such books as my
grandfather had collected upon the Civil War. I found that this war
was fought largely by boys, that more men enlisted at eighteen than
at any other age. When I thought of those battlefields--and I
thought of them much in those days--there was always that glory of
youth above them, that impetuous, generous passion stirring the long
lines on the march, the blue battalions in the plain. The bugle,
whenever I have heard it since, has always seemed to me the very
golden throat of that boyhood which spent itself so gaily, so
incredibly.

"I used often to wonder how it was that this uncle of mine, who
seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliancy allotted to
his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour,
had left so little trace in the house where he was