lement of an
advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.

As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as
though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office
helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on
the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older
brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering
editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her
father had written them).

"Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving
the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in
handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."

He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a
Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the
printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by
the window in his long apron, a composing stick in his hand, with the
tears rolling unheeded down his face.

I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great
burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of
that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the
characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, passed through the fire
of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again
be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier--he was
too young at the time--the most impressionable years of his boyhood were
saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers
marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them,
the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and
wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never
forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's assassination.

There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and
another over the mantel in the dining-room--the one that played so
important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.

Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a
certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead
Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read
the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his
throat:

_You_ lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier;
You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace