away without uniforms all in twenty-four hours. But not before they
had found time to have their pictures taken in borrowed regimentals.
For twenty years after the war the daguerreotypes of the soldiers
taken at Leavenworth that day were the proudest adornments of the
centre-tables of Sycamore Ridge, and even now on Lincoln Avenue, in a
little white cottage with green blinds, that sits in a broad smooth
lawn with elm trees on it, stands an easel. On the easel is a
picture--an enlarged crayon drawing of a straight, handsome young
fellow in a captain's uniform. One hand is in his coat, and the other
at his hip. His head is thrown back with a fierce determination into
the photographer's iron rest and all together the picture is marked
with the wrinkled front of war. For over one corner of the easel hangs
a sword with an ivory handle, and upon it is an inscription
proclaiming the fact that the sword was presented to Captain Philemon
R. Ward by his company for gallant conduct on the field of battle on
the night of August 4, 1861. Above the easel in the corner hangs
another picture--that of a sweet-faced old man of seventy, beaming
rather benignly over his white lawn necktie. The forty-five years that
have passed between the two faces have trimmed the hair away from the
temples and the brow, have softened the mouth, and have put patience
into the eyes--the patience of a great faith often tried but never
broken. The five young women of the household know that the crayon
portrait on the bamboo easel is highly improper as a parlour
ornament--for do they not teach school, and do they not take all the
educational journals and the crafty magazines of art? But the hand
that put it there was proud of its handiwork, and she who hung the
sword upon the easel is gone away, so the girls smile at the fierce
young boyish face in the picture as they pass it, and throw a kiss at
the face above it, and the easel is not moved.