e girls were eager for service, and the boys were eager for service.
The girls stood by the boys, and the boys stood by the girls. The
husbands stood by the wives, and the wives stood by the husbands. I do
not mean that there was not many another community in which everybody
was steadfast and true. But I do mean that here was one great family,
although the census rated it as five-and-twenty families,--which had
one heart and one soul in the contest, and which went into it with one
heart and one soul,--every man and every woman of them all bearing each
other's burdens.

Little Sim Cutts, who broke the silence that night when the post-man
threw down the "Boston Gazette," was an old man of eighty-five when they
all got the news of the shots at Fort Sumter. The old man was as hale
and hearty as are half the men of sixty in this land to-day. With all
his heart he encouraged the boys who volunteered in answer to the first
call for regiments from Maine. Then with full reliance on the traditions
of the "Fighting Twenty-seventh," he explained to the fishermen and the
coasters that Uncle Abraham would need them for his web-footed service,
as well as for his legions on the land. And they found out their ways to
Portsmouth and to Charlestown, so that they might enter the navy as
their brothers entered the army. And so it was, that, when Christmas
came in 1861, there was at Tripp's Cove only one of that noble set of
young fellows, who but a year before was hauling hemlock and spruce and
fir and pine at Christmas at the girls' order, and worked in the
meeting-house for two days as the girls bade them work, so that when
Parson Spaulding came in to preach his Christmas sermon, he thought the
house was a bit of the woods themselves. Only one!

And who was he?

How did he dare stay among all those girls who were crying out their
eyes, and sewing their fingers to the bones,--meeting every afternoon in
one sitting-room or another, and devouring every word that came from the
army? They read the worst-spelled letter that came home from Mike Sawin,
and prized it and blessed it and cried over it, as heartily as the
noblest description of battle that came from the pen of Carleton or of
Swinton.

Who was he?

Ah! I have caught you, have I? That was Tom Cutts,--the old General's
great-grandson,--Sim Cutts's grandson,--the very noblest and bravest of
them all. He got off first of all. He had the luck to be at Bull
Run,--and to be cut off fro