store at the Plains. They were ready to enjoy this idle hour after a busy week. After long easterly rains, the sun had at last come out brigh

the same company, on the same day, and happened to march away elbow to elbow. Then came the great experience of a great war, and the years that followed thei

es and the old white church, with its pretty belfry of four arched sides and a tiny dome at the top. The large cockerel on the vane was pointing a little south of west, and there was still light enough to make it shine bravely against the deep blue eastern sky. On the western side of the road, near the store, were the parsonage and the storekeeper's modern house, which had a French roof and some attempt at decoration, which the long-established Barlow people called gingerbread-work, and regarded with mingled pride and disdain. These buildings made the

an' I 'ain't got a bush-bean abov

him. "I've often observed that your land, though early planted, was late to sprout. I view it there's

of his mouth, as if he had a good deal more to say,

n us take no day off this season," said Asa Brown; but nobod

all flags to stick on our Joel's grave, an' Mis' Dexter always counts on havin' some for Harrison's lot. I calculate to get 'em somehow. I must make time to ride over, but I don't know where the time's comin' from out o' next week. I wish the women folks would tend to them things. There's the spot wh

him an' threw him. Eb was talkin' 'long o' me one day when he was about half full, an' says he, right out, 'I wouldn't have fell to this state,' says he, 'if I'd had me a home an' a little fam'ly; but it don't make no difference to nobody, and it's the best comfort I seem to have, an' I ain't goin' to do without it. I'm ailin' all the time,' says he, 'an' if I keep middlin' full, I make out to hold my own an' to

an' his gran'father was drinkin' men; but they was kind-hearted an' good neighbors, an' never set out to wrong nobody. 'Twas the custom to drink in their day; folks was colder an' lived poorer in early times, an

ow right. I guess she was full as well off, but it's one

he subject was too famili

t s'pose we could ever get up anything for Decoration Day. I've felt kind of 'shamed, but

oberly; but something had pleased him in the discouraged suggestion. "Perhaps we could mark the d

answer, and pres

thought to the bigness of it. The best fellows was them that had stayed to ho

places, an' when we come back we felt dreadful behind

he old folks. Father he never wanted me to go to the war,-'twas partly his Quaker breed,-an' he used to be dreadful mortified with the way I hung round down here to the store an' loafed round a-talkin' about when I was out South, an' arguin' with folks that didn't know nothin', about what the gene

oes, an' them things; they didn't seem to strike me in the right place; but I tell ye it kind o' starts me now every time I come on the flag sudden,-it does so. A spell ago-'long in the fall, I guess it was-I was over to Alton, an' there was a fire company paradin'. They'd got the prize at a fair, an' had just come home on the cars, an'

use; "but I expect we should know better what we was about. I don' know bu

and they done well," answered Henry Merrill quickly. "We three was

he was into the port o' Beaufort lo'din' with yaller-pine lumber, an' he roved into an old buryin'-ground there is there, an' he see a stone that had on it some young Southern fellow's name that was killed in the war, an' under it was, 'He died for his country

men made

s ought to have the good of it; I'd like to have my boys see somethin' different. Le's get together what men th

ghe; he can't march," said Stover. "No, 'tain't worth

g and counting two or three times on his fingers. "I can't

Jo Wade with his crutch; he's amazin' spry for a short distance. But we can't let 'em go far afoot; they're decripped men. We'll make 'e

give out some kind of a notice. You have to have a good many bunches o' flowers. I guess we'd better call a meetin', some few on us, an' talk it over first o' the week. 'Twouldn't be no great of a range for us to take to march from the old buryin'

f the stone he had set up to the memory of his only brother, w

e in town," he added anxiously, as they rose to go home. "'Tis a t

eir separate ways presently, leaving the Plains road a