om her youthful, brilliant
eyes, and saw only an overgrown, rather ignorant boy. This gave her
strength, and, though it was painful, she began speaking:

"_Understand_? Do you mean the books you are reading?"

"Yes," he murmured.

"Well," she smiled weakly, "I've been reading them, too."

"_You_!" He was shocked. He looked at her as if she had revealed a new
woman to him.

"Yes," she said, quickly. "I found them in your room."

He was amazedly silent. He felt then that he had never really known his
mother.

"Joe," she said, tremulously, "I want to tell you a little about the
war.... There are things I haven't told you."

And while he sat, stupefied and dumfounded, she told him--not all, but
many things. She was back in the Boston of the sixties, when she was a
young girl, when that town was the literary center of America, when high
literature was in the air, when the poets had great fame and every one,
even the business man, was a poet. She had seen or met some of the great
men. Once Whittier was pointed out to her, at a time when his lines on
slavery were burning in her brain. She had seen the clear-eyed Lowell
walking under the elms of Cambridge, and she justly felt that she was
one of those

"Who dare to be
In the right with two or three."

Once, even, a relative of hers, a writer then well known and now
forgotten, had taken her out to see "the white Mr. Longfellow." It was
one of the dream-days of her life--the large, spacious, square Colonial
house where once Washington had lived; the poet's square room with its
round table and its high standing desk in which he sometimes wrote; the
sloping lawn; the great trees; and, better than anything, the simple,
white-haired, white-bearded poet who took her hand so warmly and spoke
so winningly and simply. He even gave her a scrap of paper on which were
written some of his anti-slavery lines.

Those were great days--days when America, the world's experiment in
democracy, was thrown into those fires that consume or purify. The great
test was on, whether such a nation could live, and Boston was athrob
with love of country and eagerness to sacrifice. The young, beautiful,
clear-eyed girl did not hesitate a moment to urge Henry Blaine to give
up all and go to the front. It was like tearing her own heart in two,
and, possibly at a word, Blaine would have remained in Boston and helped
in some other way. But she fought it out with him one night on Boston