autumn wind;
"Brattle Street," whose rich full chords are like a confession of
faith,--all those old tunes that have grown richer and sweeter by
carrying heavenward on the wings of song the devotion of worshipping
souls.

Suddenly Aunt Jane's voice ceased in the middle of a word. I looked
up. She was sitting motionless, holding in her hand a piece of rusty
iron and gazing at it with tragic eyes. As she gazed, that which had
been its sheath fell from it in flakes, and there before us, wasted to
half its size by the dampness of years, was the dull ghost of a
bayonet that once had glittered in the sun's rays on many a southern
battle field.

"It's that old bayonet," she said, slowly and sadly. "I ricollect the
day Abram plowed it up and brought it to the house. The soldiers
camped all around our place durin' the war, and to this day you can't
run a furrow without turnin' up a minie-ball or an old canteen or
somethin' o' the sort to carry you back to war times and make your
heart ache for days to come."

She ran her finger slowly down the bayonet, laying it against the
point, while the lines in her face deepened under the shadow of bitter
memories.

"To think," she said at last, "that human bein's made in the image o'
God, men and brothers, would make a thing like this to use against
each other! The longer I live, child, the stranger that war seems to
me. I couldn't understand it before it come nor while it was goin' on,
and now, after all these years, it's jest as mysterious as it ever
was. You know it begun in the spring, the war did, and there's a
certain kind o' spring wind and the way the air smells that takes me
back to the day when the news come to Goshen that Fort Sumter'd been
fired on; and if I was to live to be as old as Methuselah, I don't
reckon there'd ever be a spring that wouldn't bring back the spring of
'61.

"The comin' of war is a curious thing, child. You know how it is when
you're sittin' in the house or on the porch of a summer's day doin'
some piece o' work and thinkin' about nothin' but that work, and the
sun'll be shinin' out doors and everything pretty and peaceful, and
all at once you'll look up and notice that it's gittin' dark, and
you'll hear a little thunder away off yonder in the hills, and before
you're ready for it, why the storm's broke and the rain's beatin' in
at the windows and doors and the wind's blowin' through the house and
carryin' everything before it. Well, that's the w