nd artillery carriages.
In the act of putting the book down, I happened to run over the
pages to the end, and on the fly-leaf at the back I saw his name
again, and a drawing--with his initials and a date--of the Federal
flag; above it, written in a kind of arch and in the same unformed
hand:

'Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?'

It was a stiff, wooden sketch, not unlike a detail from some
Egyptian inscription, but, the moment I saw it, wind and color
seemed to touch it. I caught up the book, blew out the lamp, and
rushed down into the garden.

"I seemed, somehow, at last to have known him; to have been with him
in that careless, unconscious moment and to have known him as he was
then.

"As I sat there in the rush of this realization, the wind began to
rise, stirring the light foliage of the locust over my head and
bringing, fresher than before, the woody odor of the pale roses that
overran the little neglected garden. Then, as it grew stronger, it
brought the sound of something sighing and stirring over my head in
the perfumed darkness.

"I thought of that sad one of the Destinies who, as the Greeks
believed, watched from birth over those marked for a violent or
untimely death. Oh, I could see him, there in the shine of the
morning, his book idly on his knee, his flashing eyes looking
straight before him, and at his side that grave figure, hidden in
her draperies, her eyes following his, but seeing so much
farther--seeing what he never saw, that great moment at the end,
when he swayed above his comrades on the earthen wall.

"All the while, the bunting I had run up in the morning flapped fold
against fold, heaving and tossing softly in the dark--against a sky
so black with rain clouds that I could see above me only the blur of
something in soft, troubled motion.

"The experience of that night, coming so overwhelmingly to a man so
dead, almost rent me in pieces. It was the same feeling that artists
know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of
union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad
that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and
blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not
begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and
rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until
the dawn of morning, and all night long my li