hing floating overhead,
from the white staff at the stern, he held still dearer. One officer,
who was most urgent in his pleadings, was her bonny "Uncle Barney,"
mother's own brother, and when he left, without kiss for her or
handclasp for the sad-faced soldier in the worn uniform of blue,
mother's heart seemed almost breaking. Father took them to _his_
father's old home, and left them there while he went to drilling
militiamen north of the Ohio, and was presently made a colonel of
volunteers. But the people who lived about them were all for the South,
and they could not forgive mother for his taking sides against them;
so, throughout the long bitter struggle, while he was at the front or
suffering in Southern prison, as happened once, and from Northern
suspicion, as happened much more than once, they lived in lodgings in a
quiet little country town, where brother and she went hand in hand to
school and saw little of the outer world and nothing of the war. Then
at last came peace, and in '66 the reorganization of the army, and
father--in a general's uniform on a major's pay. Then in '69 General
Grant appointed brother a cadet, and all were so proud and hopeful when
he left them for the Point. He was the image of Uncle Barney, who was
killed leading his splendid brigade in one of the earliest battles in
Virginia, and, like Uncle Barney, brother was high-spirited and
impatient. Mathematics and demerit set him back in '70 and dropped him
out entirely in '71, when father was weeks away across the deserts of
Arizona, and they were in lodgings at San Francisco, and poor mother
was nearly distraught with grief and anxiety. Brother never came back
to them. He went straight, it seems, to the Brooklyn Navy-Yard;
enlisted in the Marines, and, within five months thereafter, jumped
from the deck of the "Yantic" in a swift tideway at Amoy, striving to
aid a drowning shipmate, and was never seen again. That was the saddest
Christmas they ever knew. Father had to return to his post, and all
that year of '72 they wore deep mourning and went nowhere. During the
spring of '73 mother was rallying a little, and loving army friends
from the Presidio and Angel Islands, who used to come to see them so
often, now sought to have Lilian visit them; but wisely Mrs. Archer
kept her at her studies and her music and away from possible
fascination of the garrison, and except, therefore, for two dances
given by the artillery, and one charming, rose-bowe