honour—as he saw it—the more.

“Why don’t you speak?” he whispered at last.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Wilfred,” faltered his mother, although there was but one thing to say, and she knew that she must say it, yet she was fighting, woman-like, for time.

“I will tell you what to say,” said the boy.

“What?”

“Say that you won’t mind if I go down to Petersburg and enlist.”

“But that would not be true, Wilfred,” said his mother, smiling faintly.

“True or not, mother, I can’t stay here.”

“Oh, Wilfred, Russell has gone, and Howard is going, and now you want to go and get killed.”

“I don’t want to be killed at all, mother.”

“But you are so young, my boy.”

“Not younger than Tom Kittridge,” answered the boy; “not younger than Ell Stuart or Cousin Steven or hundreds of other boys down there. See, mother—they have called for all over eighteen, weeks ago; the seventeen call may be out any moment; the next one after that takes me. Do you want me to stay here until I am ordered out! I should think not. Where’s your pride?”

“My pride? Ah, my son, it is on the battlefield, over at Seven Pines, and upstairs with Howard.”

“Well, I don’t care, mother,” he persisted obstinately. “I love you and all that, you know it,—but I can’t stand this. I’ve got to go. I must go.”

Mrs. Varney recognised from the ring of determination in the boy’s voice that his mind was made up. She could no longer hold him. With or without her consent he would go, and why should she withhold it? Other boys as young as hers had gone and had not come back. Aye, there was the rub: she had given one, the other trembled on the verge, and now the last one! Yes, he must go, too,—to live or die as God pleased. If they wanted her to sacrifice everything on the altar of her country, she had her own pride, she would do it, as hundreds of other women had done. 

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