"

And then Cranston saw her eyes were full of tears.

She had tried lawyers. She had used money. She had invoked the influence
of powerful friends. Each and everyone consulted assured her that the
case could be settled in a twinkling. They would get the boy discharged
at once. Then one after another all had failed, and then some one
suggested to see him, Cranston; he was a regular, perhaps he could help.
It was hard to think of her son as a soldier, but, said she, if he had
to be, for a time at least, why not get him out of where he was and put
him at West Point? She had come, she said, to tell Cranston the whole
story, and then he could have kicked himself for the momentary amusement
she had caused him.

Ah, what an old, time-worn story of mother love, mother spoiling, mother
sorrow! Her bonny boy, her first-born, wild, impulsive, self-indulgent,
overindulged as was his father before him, he had gone the pace from
early youth; had been sent to and sent from one school after another;
had filled and forfeited half a dozen clerkships; tampered with cards
and drink and bad company. Mr. Barnard had been willing to do
anything--everything for him, but he had dishonored every effort, broken
every compact, failed in every trial, forfeited every trust. At last
there had been hot and furious words, expulsion from the house and home,
a life of recklessness, gambling and drinking on moneys wrung from her
until her patience and supplies both had given out. Then some darker
shadow,--arrest and incarceration, one more appeal to mother, one more,
on her knees, from mother to husband, a compromised case, a quashed
indictment, temporary residence at a resort for cure of inebriates--the
one condition exacted by Barnard--and prompt relapse, when discharged,
into his former habits,--disgraceful arrest because of some trouble into
which he had been led while drinking. This, all this she had borne, but
never dreamed, said she, that worse still could follow,--that he could
sink so low as to become a soldier.

What Captain Cranston would have said to a man who had come to him with
such a tale, and with such unflattering conception of the profession he
was proud of, need not here be recorded. It was a mother, helpless,
sorrowing, and honest at least in her impression of the step taken by
her recreant boy. She had come craving help and counsel, not instruction
in the injustice of her estimates. Quivering, trembling, weeping, the
heart-sick