scarlet gown.

It is strange that the boy did not remember how Sycamore Ridge took
the call to arms for the war between the states. All he remembered of
the great event in our history as it touched the town was that one day
he heard there was going to be a war. And then everything seemed to
change. A dread came over the people. It fell upon the school, where
every child had a father who was going away.

And it was because Madison Hendricks, the first man to leave for the
war, was father of Bob and Elmer Hendricks that John's first
associations of the great Civil War go back to the big black-bearded
man. For Madison Hendricks, who was a graduate of West Point, and a
veteran of the Mexican War, was called to Washington in May, and his
boys acquired a prestige that was not accorded to them by the mere
fact that their father was president of the town company, and was
accounted the first citizen of the town. Madison Hendricks, who owned
the land on which the town was built, Madison Hendricks, scholar and
gentleman, veteran of the Mexican War, first mayor of Sycamore Ridge
upon its incorporation,--his sons had no standing. But Madison
Hendricks, formally summoned to go to Washington to put down the
rebellion, and leaving on the stage with appropriate ceremonies,
--there was a man who could bequeath to his posterity in the boy
world something of his consequence.

So in the pall that came upon the school in Sycamore Ridge that spring
of '61, Bob and Elmer Hendricks were heroes, and their sister--who
was their only guardian in their father's absence--had to put them in
her dresses and send them to bed, and punish them in all the shameful
ways that she knew to take what she called "the tuck out of them." And