the steel curly-cues curving over the toes, or filing a groove in the
blades, the boy's greatest joy was with his mother. Sometimes as she
ironed she told him stories of his father, or when the child was sick
and nervous, as a special favour, on his promise to take the medicine
and not ask for a drink, she would bring her guitar from under the bed
and tune it up and play with a curious little mouse-like touch. And on
rare occasions she would sing to her own shy maidenly accompaniment,
her voice rising scarcely higher than the wind in the sycamore at the
spring outside. The boy remembered only one line of an old song she
sometimes tried to sing: "Sleeping, I dream, love, dream, love, of
thee," but what the rest of it was, and what it was all about, he
never knew; for when she got that far, she always stopped and came to
the bed and lay beside him, and they both cried, though as a child he
did not know why.

So the winter of 1857 wore away at Sycamore Ridge, and with the coming
of the spring of '58, when the town was formally incorporated, even into
the boy world there came the murmurs of strife and alarms. The games the
boys played were war games. They had battles in the woods, between the
free-state and the pro-slavery men, and once--twice--three times there
marched by on the road real soldiers, and it was no unusual thing to see
a dragoon dismount at the town well and water his horse. The big boys in
school affected spurs, and Miss Lucy brought to school with her one
morning a long bundle, which, when it was unwrapped, disclosed the sword
of her father, Captain Barnes, presented to him by his admiring soldiers
at the close of the "Black Hawk War." John traded for a tin fife and
learned to play "Jaybird" upon it, though he preferred the jew's-harp,
and had a more varied repertory with it. Was it an era of music, or is
childhood the period of music? Perhaps this land of ours was younger
than it is now and sang more lustily, if not with great precision; for