"Say, then, Jacob, why don't you yourself write a piece to the paper telling about this regiment of yours--the way it was?"
"I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail," he had said, the ambition of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he had been--yes, none better--and a good citizen, and in his day a capable and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his own story. That morning, when the youngest grandchild slept and his daughter and his daughter's husband and the brood of his older grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words would not come--or, at least, after the first line or two they would not come.
The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on his two good legs--both good legs then--to fight for the country whose language he could not yet speak was there in bright and living colors; but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as you might say from the clear sky, a great idea--an idea so magnificent that he almost dropped the youngest Miss Engel off his lap at the splendid shock of it.
With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the sudden jostle the young lady slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel apartment.