-rimmed hat.

During the time when he was going to school by day and working
evenings and caring for the town herd through the summer, the war was
dragging wearily on. Sometimes a soldier came home on a furlough and
there was news of the Sycamore Ridge men, but oftener it was a season
of waiting and working. The women and children cared for the farms and
the stores as best they could and lived, heaven only knows how, and
opened every newspaper with horror and dread, and glanced down the
long list of names of the dead, the missing and the wounded, fearful
of what they might see. Mrs. Barclay heard from Miss Lucy and through
her kept track of Philemon Ward, who was transferred to another
regiment after he was made major. And when he was made a colonel at
Shiloh, there were tear blots on Miss Lucy's letter that told of it,
and after Appomattox he was brevetted a general. As for Captain
Culpepper, he came home a colonel, and Jake Dolan came home a first
lieutenant. But Watts McHurdie came home with a letter from Lincoln
about his song, and he was the greatest man of all of them.

It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people
came from, no one could say--yet they came, and young Barclay
remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and
running over the rafters of new houses. But when the war closed, the
great caravan that had lagged while the war was raging, began to trail
itself steadily in front of Mrs. Barclay's door, through the streets
of Sycamore Ridge and out over the western hills. Soldiers with their
families passed, going to the free homesteads, and the line of movers'
wagons began with daybreak and rumbled by far into the night. But
hundreds of wagons stopped in Sycamore Ridge, and the stage came
crowded every night. Brick buildings, the town's mortal pride, began
showing their fronts on Main Street, and other streets in the town
began to assert themselves. Mrs. Barclay's school grew from a score of
children in 1864 to three rooms full in '65, and in '66 the whole town
turned out to welcome General and Mrs. Ward, she that was Miss Lucy
Barnes, and there was a reunion of "C" Company that night, and a
camp-fire in Culpepper Hall, and the next day Lige Bemis was painting
a sign which read "Philemon R. Ward, Attorney-at-Law, Pension Matters
Promptly Attended To." And the first little Ward was born at the
Thayer House and named Eli Thayer Ward.

The spring that found John Barclay