found it
easy to do things and to be a good deal of a personage.

He stared up silently at the space above the mantel where hung a
portrait that gazed back at him, with features pale in the fading light.
Singularly alike were the boyish face that looked up and the boyish face
that looked down, though the painted Percival, a little idealistic about
the eyes, wholly firm about the mouth, appeared the more determined of
the two. Perhaps this came from the shoulder-straps, the blue uniform,
and the military squareness of the shoulders.

"Yes, you are like him, Dick." Mrs. Percival spoke to his thoughts. The
boy looked up startled.

"Am I?" he asked. "I wish I might be. I wish I might be half so much of
a man."

"And I hope you will be more--no, not that. He was my all. I can hardly
wish you to _be_ more, but I hope you will _do_ more. At least you don't
have a drag on you from the beginning, as he had. Has Dick told you the
story, Ellery?" She turned with a gentle smile toward the other man.
"You see I can't help calling you Ellery. Dick's letters have made you
partly mine already. We are not strangers at all."

Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the
slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.

"You don't know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine," he
said. "I never knew my mother."

"You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a
fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know
how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg,
though few of them lived to tell of their own bravery? It makes the lump
come up in my throat even to remember it, just as it did when I first
heard the news and knew that my boy-lover was there."

There was silence a moment.

"Ah, Dick, you have a young body to match your heart," Mrs. Percival
went on, "but Dad, before he was twenty, carried a bullet in his side.
He had to conquer pain before he could spend strength on other things."

Dick rubbed his cheek with the mother's trembling hand.

"Yes," he said soberly, "it must have been harder to endure the
sufferings that clung to him and killed him at last than it would have
been to give everything in one swift sacrifice. Endurance,--that's a
word I don't know, do I, mother?"

"No, dear, that's the word you know least; but you'll have to learn it."

"Ellery, I guess that's where you have the advantage of me." Dick