HE boy was reading his letters. The sharp bustle of departure was over, and the ship had settled down to such quiet as is possible with four thousand young voices aboard, four thousand pairs of army-issue shoes, eighteen mascots of noise-producing varieties, and a fog over the bay.
There had been a sick feeling in what the boy would have said was his stomach, when the dim outlines of the city faded into that early-morning haze. He had cheered and waved his hat at the Goddess of Liberty, along with the others, and in a restrained voice, along the rail, he had sung in a bass newly acquired and very, very deep, “Good-bye, Broadway, Hello, France!”
The singing had cheered him. He had been hanging over the stern, but now he wandered forward.
Then he remembered his letters. There were four. He found a sheltered spot and sat down to read them. One was in an old hand, feeble and shaken. The capitals were made with tiny flourishes, and at the top of each sheet was the mark of a pin, where had been fastened underneath a sheet of lines, to show through and keep the writing straight.
The second was from his mother. It was a broad, firm script, on heavy paper. He rather thought there might be a check in it. Over the third he was puzzled; then his face cleared.
“Aunt Fanny!” he said. “Good old girl!”
He kept the fourth for the last. It was in an unformed girlish hand, written with a stub pen, and it was rather fat and heavy. He held it for a moment before he slipped it back into the pocket of his blouse.
He read his grandmother's letter first.
“My dear Grandson,” it said. “It is a long time since I have written any letters. Your Aunt Fanny does my writing for me. But now that you are going away to fight, I must send you my blessing and good-bye. It is strongly borne in on me that I shall not be here when you come back. You must not feel badly about that, if it is God's will that I am taken before long. I have lived my time, and more. I have had much happiness, and so many that I have loved are waiting for me on the other side that my going to them will be a great joy.
“I have knitted you six pairs of socks, and I have
sent you also the Testament your grandfather carried
through the Civil War. It was returned to me when
he died at Appomattox, along with his watch. As my
eldest grandchild, this watch will be yours some day.
“As I sit here on this quiet Sabbath day, my thoughts go back, as the thoughts of the old always do, to the past. I see your grandfather's face when the news came that war was declared against the Southern Confederacy. He was uncertain what to do. Your father was a baby then, and I was not very strong. How strange it must seem to him, waiting over there, that I have been so long in coming to him.
“At first it did not seem possible for him to leave us. Then, on a Sabbath day very like this one, we went to church together, and the clergyman announced that he had found his duty lay with the colors. One by one the men in the congregation rose and joined him.
“The memories of the old are strange. I have forgotten so much since then. But I remember everything of that day your father, asleep on my arm, and your grandfather's face, white and set. Then I saw him take up his Testament, and open it at random, and sit with it in his hand, thinking.
“He passed it over to me, and his finger was on the verse his eyes had found to lead him. You will find the page marked by your father's picture. 'What doth it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but hath not works? Can that faith save him?'
“He gave me the Book, and he put his hand for a moment on your father's head. Then he stood up and said: 'I am ready to go.'
“Your father carried the Testament through the Spanish War, and now you are to carry it to France. I shall have a splendid story to tell when I join them all on the other side. My only regret is that you have no son. I should like to feel, before I go, that the fighting traditions of the family are to be carried down for other generations to come.
“The old see many things. They see that there are things better worth while than length of years, and that all that is worth living for may be crowded into a few short days. They see that life itself is nothing, and that what counts is duty and achievement. And they have learned, at the cost of much sorrow, that we are all in the hands of a greater power to use as He wills.
“The peace of God be and abide with you always.”