two days before, this man, Si Johnson, stood in the doorway of his
house and looked out at the falling rain. It had rained for three days, so
that they could not plow, and Si was angry. Besides this, his two brothers
had enlisted and gone away to the War and left him all the work to do. He
did not go to War because he was a "Copperhead"; and as he stood there in
the doorway looking at the rain, he took a chew of tobacco, and then he
swore a terrible oath.

And ere the swear-words had escaped from his lips, there came a blinding
flash of lightning, and the man fell all in a heap like a sack of oats.

And he was dead.

Whether he died because he was a Copperhead, or because he took a chew of
tobacco, or because he swore, I could not exactly understand. I waited for
a convenient lull in the conversation and asked the preacher why the man
died, and he patted me on the head and told me it was "the vengeance of
God," and that he hoped I would grow up and be a good man and never chew
tobacco nor swear.

The preacher is alive now. He is an old, old man with long, white
whiskers, and I never see him but that I am tempted to ask for the exact
truth as to why Si Johnson was struck by lightning.

Yet I suppose it was because he was a Copperhead: all Copperheads chewed
tobacco and swore, and that his fate was merited no one but the living
Copperheads in that community doubted.

That was an eventful day to me. Like men whose hair turns from black to
gray in a night, I had left babyhood behind at a bound, and the problems
of the world were upon me, clamoring for solution.

* * * * *

There was war in the land. When it began I did not know, but that it was
something terrible I could guess. I thought of it all the rest of the day
and dreamed of it at night. Many men had gone away; and every day men in
blue straggled by, all going south, forever south.

And all the men straggling along that road stopped to get a drink at our
well, drawing the water with the sweep, and drinking out of the bucket,
and squirting a mouthful of water over each other. They looked at my
father's creaking doctor's sign, and sang, "Old Mother Hubbard, she went
to the cupboard."

They all sang that. They were very jolly, just as though they were going
to a picnic. Some of them came back that way a few years later and they
were not so jolly. And some there were who never came back at all.

Freight-trains passed southward,