o me as
if I never again wanted walls to close in on me. All my fear was gone,
and I felt wild and glad. I could not believe that I was only a little
girl. I felt taller even than my father.

Father's mood was like mine in a way. He had memories to add to his
emotion, but then, on the other hand, he lacked the sense of discovery
I had, for he had known often such feelings as were coming to me for
the first time. When he was a young man he had been a colporteur for the
American Bible Society among the Lake Superior Indians, and in that
way had earned part of the money for his course at the University of
Michigan; afterward he had gone with other gold-seekers to Pike's Peak,
and had crossed the plains with oxen, in the company of many other
adventurers; then, when President Lincoln called for troops, he had
returned to enlist with the Michigan men, and had served more than three
years with McClellan and Grant.

So, naturally, there was nothing he did not know about making himself
comfortable in the open. He knew all the sorrow and all the joy of
the homeless man, and now, as he cooked, he began to sing the old
songs--"Marching Through Georgia," and "Bury Me Not on the Lone
Prairie," and "In the Prison Cell I Sit." He had been in a Southern
prison after the Battle of the Wilderness, and so he knew how to sing
that song with particular feeling.

I had heard war stories all my life, though usually father told such
tales in a half-joking way, as if to make light of everything he had
gone through. But now, as we ate there under the tossing pines, and the
wild chorus in the treetops swelled like a rising sea, the spirit of the
old days came over him. He was a good "stump speaker," and he knew how
to make a story come to life, and never did all his simple natural gifts
show themselves better than on this night, when he dwelt on his old
campaigns.

For the first time I was to look into the heart of a kindly natured man,
forced by terrible necessity to go through the dread experience of war.
I gained an idea of the unspeakable homesickness of the man who leaves
his family to an unimagined fate, and sacrifices years in the service
of his country. I saw that the mere foregoing of roof and bed is an
indescribable distress; I learned something of what the palpitant
anxiety before a battle must be, and the quaking fear at the first
rattle of bullets, and the half-mad rush of determination with which men
force valour into their fal