General went on to tell of his struggle to induce the little man to
accept his aid--to accept a loan of a few hundreds of dollars from
Prentice, the banker! "I never had anything hurt me so in all my life,"
he said. "Finally I took him into the bank--and now you can see he has
enough to eat!"

They began to sing again, and Montague sat and thought over the story.
It seemed to him typical of the thing that made this meeting beautiful
to him--of the spirit of brotherhood and service that reigned
here.--They sang "We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground"; they
sang "Benny Havens, Oh!" and "A Soldier No More"; they sang other songs
of tenderness and sorrow, and men felt a trembling in their voices and
a mist stealing over their eyes. Upon Montague a spell was falling.

Over these men and their story there hung a mystery--a presence of
wonder, that discloses itself but rarely to mortals, and only to those
who have dreamed and dared. They had not found it easy to do their
duty; they had had their wives and children, their homes and friends
and familiar places; and all these they had left to serve the Republic.
They had taught themselves a new way of life--they had forged
themselves into an iron sword of war. They had marched and fought in
dust and heat, in pouring rains and driving, icy blasts; they had
become men grim and terrible in spirit-men with limbs of steel, who
could march or ride for days and nights, who could lie down and sleep
upon the ground in rain-storms and winter snows, who were ready to leap
at a word and seize their muskets and rush into the cannon's mouth.
They had learned to stare into the face of death, to meet its fiery
eyes; to march and eat and sleep, to laugh and play and sing, in its
presence--to carry their life in their hands, and toss it about as a
juggler tosses a ball. And this for Freedom: for the star-crowned
goddess with the flaming eyes, who trod upon the mountain-tops and
called to them in the shock and fury of the battle; whose trailing
robes they followed through the dust and cannon-smoke; for a glimpse of
whose shining face they had kept the long night vigils and charged upon
the guns in the morning; for a touch of whose shimmering robe they had
wasted in prison pens, where famine and loathsome pestilence and raving
madness stalked about in the broad daylight.

And now this army of deliverance, with its waving banners and its
prancing horses and its rumbling cannon, had marche