And so July 3d came, bringing with it the bare tidings of that closing desperate battle of the week at Malvern Hill, and the movement of what was left of the Army of the Potomac to a safe resting place on the James River. We were beginning to get the details of local interest by the slow single wire from Thessaly, and sickening enough they were. The village streets were filled with silent, horror-stricken crowds. The whole community seemed to have but a single face, repeated upon the mental vision at every step--a terrible face with distended, empty eyes, riven brows, and an open drawn mouth like the old Greek mask of tragedy.
“I swan! I don’t know whether to keep open to-morrow or not,” said Mr. Newton Shull, for perhaps the twentieth time, as he wandered once again from the reception-room into the little workshop behind. “In some ways it’s kind of agin my principles to work on Independence Day--but, then again, if I thought there was likely to be a good many farmers comin’ into town--”
“They’ll be plenty of ’em cornin’ in,” said the boy, over his shoulder, “but they’ll steer clear of here.”
“I’m ’fraid so,” sighed Mr. Shull. He advanced a listless step or two and gazed with dejected apathy at the newspaper map tacked to the wall, on which the boy was making red and blue crosses with a colored pencil. “I don’t see much good o’ that,” he said. “Still, of course, if it eases your mind any--”
“That’s where the fightin’ finished,” observed the boy, pointing to a big mark on the map. “That’s Malvern Hill there, and here--down where the river takes the big bend--that’s Harrison’s Landing, where the army’s movin’ to. See them seven rings? Them are the battles, one each day, as our men forced their way down through the Chickahominy swamps, beginnin’ up in the corner with Beaver Dam Creek. If the map was a little higher it ’ud show the Pamunkey, where they started from. My uncle says that the whole mistake was in ever abandoning the Pamunkey.”
“Pa-monkey or Ma-monkey,” said Newton Shull, gloomily, “it wouldn’t be no comfort to me to see it, even on a map. It’s jest taken and busted me and my business here clean as a whistle. We ain’t paid expenses two days in a week sence Marseny went. Here I’ve got now so ’t I kin take a plain, everyday sort o’ picture jest about as well as he did--a little streakid sometimes, perhaps, and more or less pinholes--but still pretty middlin’ fair on an average, and then, darn my buttons if they don’t all stop comin’. It positively don’t seem to me as if there was a single human bein’ in Dearborn County that ’ud have his picture took as a gift. All they want now is to have enlargements thrown up from little likenesses of their men folks that have been killed, and them I don’t know how to do no more’n a babe unborn.”