passing curious thing; for when word came of Henry Schnitzler's death,
Mary Murphy, of the Thayer House, put off Gabriel Carnine's ring, and
wept many tears in the stage driver's coffee and wore black in her hat
for a year, and when Gabriel came home, she married him and all went
as merrily as a wedding-bell. What covert tenderness or dream of gauzy
romance was in her memory, the town could never know; but the
Carnines' first boy was named Henry, and for many years after the war,
she was known among the men, who do not understand a woman's heart, as
the "War widow by brevet." Yet that was Henry's "deathless fame" in
Sycamore Ridge, for the town has long since forgotten him, and even
his name means nothing to our children, who see it on the bronze
statue set up by the rich John Barclay to commemorate our soldier
dead.

But John was our first war hero. And when he brought his battle scars
home that September night in '61, for hours before the stage drove
across Sycamore Creek the boy was filled with a nameless dread that he
might be spanked.

They carried him on a cot to his mother's house, and put him in the
great carved four-poster bed, and in the morning Miss Lucy came and
hovered over him, and they talked of Captain Ward to her heart's
content, and the boy told Miss Lucy the gossip of the hospital,--that
Captain Ward was to be made a major,--and she kissed him and petted
him until he was glad none of the boys was around to see the sickening
spectacle. And then Miss Lucy and Mrs. Barclay told the child of their
plans,--that Miss Lucy was going to war as a nurse, and that Mrs.
Barclay was to teach the Sycamore Ridge school during the winter. And
in a few weeks John was out of the hero business, working in
Culpepper's store after school, and getting used to a limp that stayed