No stretching of hospitable arms could shelter the vast crowd which gathered upon this occasion. The boarding-houses which accommodated ten guests during the ordinary summer traffic now took thirty, the hotels set up as many cot-beds as their halls would hold, the students of the college and the theological seminary shared their rooms or gave them up entirely, in faculty houses every room was filled, and all church doors were thrown wide. Yet many men—and old men—spent the night upon the street.
Gunner Criswell wondered often whether many lives ran like his, up and up to a sharp peak of happiness, then plunged down, down to inexpressible misery. As a boy he had been intensely happy, eager, ambitious, alive to all the glory of the world. He had married the girl whom he loved, and had afterward enlisted, scorning any fears that he might not return. On the second day of July, 1863, on his twenty-third birthday, he had lost his sight in an explosion on the battle-field of Gettysburg; on the same day his young wife had died in their faraway corner of the state, leaving a helpless baby to a blind and sick father.
To-day the daughter was middle-aged, the father old. They lived together on their little farm in Greene County, Ellen managing the farm and doing much of the work, Gunner Criswell making baskets. War had taken his sight, his wife, all his prospects for life; it had left him, he said, Ellen, and the fresh, clear mountain air, a strong pair of hands, and his own soul. Life had settled at last to a quiet level of peace. He had learned to read the raised language of the blind, but he could not afford many books. He was poor; owing to an irregularity in his enlistment the Government had not given him a pension, nor had any one taken the trouble to have the matter straightened out. The community was small and scattered, few persons knew him, and no Congressman needed his vote in that solidly Republican district. Nor was he entirely certain that the giving of pensions to those who could work was not a form of pauperization. He, for instance, had been pretty well handicapped, yet he had got on. He said to himself often that when one went to war one offered everything. If there was in his heart any faint, lingering bitterness because his country had done nothing for him, who had given her so much, he checked it sternly.