lory that he had been a part of the
finest army known in history. He believed that the men who made history
ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged
his companions in arms to set down everything they could remember of
their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written home, so
that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the
regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal
character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the
fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of
fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his
want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and
American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material
which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it
to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he even
offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took the
complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a crank
on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to their
workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental
history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They,
always give him the title with which he had been breveted at the
close of the war; but he was known to the younger, generation of his
fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the
presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she
called him Poppa, as they did.

The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father's affairs
without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the
popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined
with his mother in a respect for Kenton's theory of the regimental
history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a
little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their
party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history,
but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly
or indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for
parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from
young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays,
for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and
she devoted herself to her ple