worked and waited, everything would turn out all right. So
Mr. Lincoln would be gone for four years, perhaps eight. Well, since a
Jewish gentleman had sent him a going-away present, wouldn't it be a
fine thing for a Jewish boy to send him some gift when he returned to
his home in Springfield? Morris wasn't sure just what the gift would
be, but he was no longer worried. Even four years were not long to
wait, especially if one had to save a good deal of money in the
interval. For Morris was sure that he would have to send a really
expensive present; perhaps a gold watch, which at that particular
moment was the one thing, next to a Shetland pony, he most desired for
himself.

The four years passed for Morris, now slowly when lessons were long
and hard, now all too swiftly during the holiday seasons. They were
years of struggle for the nation now torn asunder by a dreadful civil
war. Even from the first, Morris was not too young to understand the
history that was being made about him; the firing upon Fort Sumter;
the secession of the southern states; Mr. Lincoln's call for
volunteers. How he despised himself for being such a small boy when he
saw his brother Harry in his blue uniform with the brass buttons! He
couldn't understand why his mother had cried when Harry went away to
be a soldier, since he himself felt cruelly cheated in being deprived
of marching off to the battle field. Nor could he understand why
Rabbi Adler's voice always faltered now when he read the _Kaddish_
prayer for the mourners every Sabbath in the synagogue, although he
had heard that his teacher's young son, Dankmar, serving in the
artillery, was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga. For war to the
little boy meant nothing but lines of straight soldiers marching to
music with flying banners above them, and even when bits of crape
appeared, so it seemed, upon the doors of every other home in the
city, he thought only of the glory, not the horror of it all. Nor did
he ever imagine how President Lincoln's great heart almost broke in
those days over the suffering not only of his own Northern soldiers,
but the Southern boys too, whom he would never call "rebels" nor cease
to regard but as brother Americans. When the boy thought of the
president at all, it was always as the captain of a mighty host,
pressing fearlessly on to victory. "Like Joshua," he thought,
remembering the verses on the flag, resolving that when victory did
come at last he would celebr