matter of course. Yet, as her son remembered her in after life, she was
the centre of everything, never idle, never hurried; every one and
everything revolved about her and received her light and warmth. She was
the refuge in every trouble, and her smile was enchanting. It was only
after that last time, when the little boy stood by his mother's bedside
awed and weeping silently in the shadow of the great darkness that was
settling upon them, that he knew how absolutely she had been the centre
and breath of his life. His father was kneeling beside the bed, with a
face as white as his mother's, and a look of such mingled agony and
resignation that Gordon never forgot it. As, because of his father's
teaching, the son in later life tried to be just to every man, so, for
his mother's sake, he remembered to be kind to every woman.

In the great upheaval that came just before the war, Major Keith stood
for the Union, but was defeated. When his State seceded, he raised a
regiment in the congressional district which he had represented for one
or two terms. As his duties took him from home much of the time, he sent
Gordon to the school of the noted Dr. Grammer, a man of active mind and
also active arm, named by his boys, from the latter quality,
"Old Hickory."

Gordon, like some older men, hoped for war with all his soul. A
great-grandfather an officer of the line in the Revolution, a
grandfather in the navy of 1812, and his father a major in the Mexican
War, with a gold-hilted sword presented him by the State, gave him a
fair pedigree, and he looked forward to being a great general himself.
He would be Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great at least. It was his
preference for a career, unless being a mountain stage-driver was. He
had seen one or two such beings in the mountains when he accompanied his
father once on a canvass that he was making for Congress, enthroned