Painted Windows | Page 6

as I ever could, what heroism and devotion and self-forgetfulness mean. I understood, too, the meaning of the words "our country," and my heart warmed to it, as in the older times the hearts of boys and girls warmed to the name of their king. The new knowledge was so beautiful that I thought then, and I think now, that nothing could have served as so fit an accompaniment to it as the shouting of those pines. They sang like heroes, and in their swaying gave me fleeting glimpses of the stars, unbelievably brilliant in the dusky purple sky, and half-obscured now and then by drifting clouds.
By and by we lay down, not far apart, each rolled in an army blanket, frayed with service. Our feet were to the fire -- for it was so that soldiers lay, my fa- ther said -- and our heads rested on mounds of pine-needles.
Sometimes in the night I felt my fa- ther's hand resting lightly on my shoul- ders to see that I was covered, but in my dreams he ceased to be my father and became my comrade, and I was a drummer boy, -- I had seen the play, "The Drummer Boy of the Rappahan- nock," -- marching forward, with set teeth, in the face of battle.
Whatever could redeem war and make it glorious seemed to flood my soul. All that was highest, all that was noble in that dreadful conflict came to me in my sleep -- to me, the child who had been born when my father was at "the front." I had a strange baptism of the spirit. I discovered sorrow and courage, singing trees and stars. I was never again to think that the fireside and fireside thoughts made up the whole of life.
My father lies with other soldiers by the Pacific; the forest sings no more; the old army blankets have disap- peared; the memories of the terrible war are fading, -- happily fading, -- but they all live again, sometimes, in my memory, and I am once more a child, with thoughts as proud and fierce and beautiful as Valkyries.

II
SOLITUDE
AMONG the pictures that I see when I look back into the past, is the one where I, a sullen, egotistic per- son nine years old, stood quite alone in the world. To he sure, there were fa- ther and mother in the house, and there were the other children, and not one among them knew I was alone. The world certainly would not have re- garded me as friendless or orphaned. There was nothing in my mere appear- ance, as I started away to school in my clean ginghams, with my well-brushed hair, and embroidered school-bag, to lead any one to suppose that I was a castaway. Yet I was -- I had discovered this fact, hidden though it might be from others.
I was no longer loved. Father and mother loved the other children; but not me. I might come home at night, fairly bursting with important news about what had happened in class or among my friends, and try to relate my little histories. But did mother listen? Not at all. She would nod like a mandarin while I talked, or go on turning the leaves of her book, or writing her letter. What I said was of no importance to her.
Father was even less interested. He frankly told me to keep still, and went on with the accounts in which he was so absurdly interested, or examined "papers" -- stupid-looking things done on legal cap, which he brought home with him from the office. No one kissed me when I started away in the morn- ing; no one kissed me when I came home at night. I went to bed unkissed. I felt myself to be a lonely and misunder- stood child -- perhaps even an adopted one.
Why, I knew a little girl who, when she went up to her room at night, found the bedclothes turned back, and the shade drawn, and a screen placed so as to keep off drafts. And her mother brushed her hair twenty minutes by the clock each night, to make it glossy; and then she sat by her bed and sang softly till the girl fell asleep.
I not only had to open my own bed, but the beds for the other children, and although I sometimes felt my mother's hand tucking in the bedclothes round me, she never stooped and kissed me on the brow and said, "Bless you, my child." No one, in all my experience, had said, "Bless you, my child." When the girl I have spoken of came into the room, her mother reached out her arms and said, before everybody, "Here comes my dear little girl." When I came into a room,