ck in place, stepped aside from
the low mound they had made, and Lloyd saw that it was smooth and green.
She started violently when the soldiers, drawn up in line, fired a parting
volley over it, but sat quietly back again when the Little Captain stepped
forward and raised his bugle. The sun was sinking low behind the locusts,
and in the golden glow filling the western sky, he softly sounded taps.
"Lights out" now for the faithful old Hero! The last bugle-call that
sounded for him was in a foreign land, but it was not as a stranger and an
alien they left him.

The flag he followed floats farther than the Stars and Stripes, waves
wider than the banner of the Kaiser. It is a world-wide flag, that flag of
perpetual peace which bears the Red Cross of Geneva. In its shadow,
whether on land or sea, all patriot hearts are at home, and under that
flag they left him.

* * * * *

A square white stone stands now under the locust where the Little Captain
sounded taps at the close of that September day. On it gleams the Red
Cross, in whose service all of Hero's lessons had been learned. But the
daily sight of it from her bedroom window no longer brings pain to the
Little Colonel. Hero is only a tender memory now, and she counts the Red
Cross above him as another talisman, like the little ring and the silver
scissors, to remind her that only through unselfish service to others can
one reach the happiness that is highest and best.

Time flies fast under the locusts. Sometimes to Papa Jack it seems only
yesterday that she clattered up and down the wide halls with her
grandfather's spurs buckled to her tiny feet. But if he misses the charm
of the baby voice that called to him then, or the childish mischievousness
of his Little Colonel, he finds a greater one in the flower-like beauty of
the tall, slender girl who stands beside the gilded harp, and sings to
him softly in the candle-light. And it is Betty's song of service that is
oftenest on her lips:

"My godmother bids me spin,
That my heart may not be sad;
Sing and spin for my brother's sake,
And the spinning makes me glad."

She knows that she can never be a Joan of Arc or a Clara Barton, and her
name will never be written in America's hall of fame, but with the sweet
ambition in her heart to make life a little lovelier for every one she
touches, she is growing up into a veritable Princess Winsome.

Often as she sings, Bett