twenty years at hull house

tell us of the long quiet days that followed his return, with the windows open that the dying eyes might look over the orchard slope to the

meadow beyond where the younger brothers were mowing the early

hay. She told us of those days when his school friends from the academy flocked in to see him, their old acknowledged leader, and of the

burning words of earnest patriotism spoken in the crowded little room,

so that in three months the academy was almost deserted and the new

company who marched away in the autumn took as drummer boy

Tommy's third brother, who was only seventeen and too young for a

regular. She remembered the still darker days that followed, when the

bright drummer boy was in Andersonville prison, and little by little

she learned to be reconciled that Tommy was safe in the peaceful home

graveyard.

However jnuch we were given to talk of war heroes, we always fell

silent as we approached an isolated farmhouse in which two old people

lived alone. Five of their sons had enlisted in the Civil War, and only

the youngest had returned alive in the spring of 1865. In the autumn

of the same year, when he was hunting for wild ducks in a swamp on

the rough little farm itself, he was accidentally shot and killed, and the

old people were left alone to struggle with the halLcleared land as best

they might. When we were driven past this forlorn little farm our

childish voices always dropped into speculative whisperings as to how

the accident could have happened to this remaining son out of all the

men in the world, to him who had escaped so many chances of death!

Our young hearts swelled in first rebellion against that which Walter Pater calls "the inexplicable shortcoming or misadventure on the part

of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly oppressed by that grief of things

as they are, so much more mysterious and intolerable than those griefs

which we think dimly to trace to man's own wrongdoing.

It was well perhaps that life thus early gave me a hint of one of her

most obstinate and insoluble riddles, for I have sorely needed the sense

of universality thus imparted to that mysterious injustice, the burden

of which we are all forced to bear and with which I have become only

too familiar.

My childish admiration for Lincoln is closely associated with a visit

made to the war eagle, Old Abe, who, as we children well knew, lived

in the state capitol of Wisconsin, only sixtyTve miles north of our

house, really no farther than an eagle could easily fly! He had been