livery-stable boy sprang out of the buggy and went to the horse's head.

"Bob lef' yo' hoss in town las' night, Mistuh Crittenden," he said.
"Miss Rachel said yestiddy she jes knowed you was comin' home this
mornin'."

Crittenden smiled--it was one of his mother's premonitions; she seemed
always to know when he was coming home.

"Come get these things," he said, and went on with his paper.

"Yessuh!"

Things had gone swiftly while he was in the hills. Old ex-Confederates
were answering the call from the Capitol. One of his father's old
comrades--little Jerry Carter--was to be made a major-general. Among the
regulars mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a
friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was
going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old
battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for
the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other
against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the
field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after
the war. And then he saw something that for a moment quite blotted the
war from his brain and made him close the paper quickly. Judith had come
home--Judith was to unveil those statues--Judith Page.

The town was asleep, except for the rattle of milk-carts, the banging of
shutters, and the hum of a street-car, and Crittenden moved through
empty streets to the broad smooth turnpike on the south, where Raincrow