A

MOS APPLEBY, leaning forward on his cane, sat listening drowsily as the regular bimonthly meeting of the Israel Dodge Post of the Grand Army of the Republic marched along its routine.

The heavy scented air of the late June afternoon slid lethargically through the windows on the fourteen old veterans who were as religious in attendance as if the meeting were a rite-which, indeed, it

was.

Amos's drowsing mind was a field of indistinct pictures: of blossoming appletrees and fresh-turned earth; of horses bending their shoulders against the traces of a plough; of growing things; of a Something that impended, a Something that would not materialize.

"... Circular here about a trip to Gettysburg. You boys come up after meeting and look it over."

He sat up straight, his interest focussed on the adjutant.

"What's that 'bout Gettysburg?" he inquired.

"Tour of the battle-field. They show you around."

"Guess they can't tell Amos much about it." George Ketteridge chuckled. "Wounded there, wasn't you, Amos?"

But Amos did not hear. Gettysburg! The Something had materialized. He sat staring into the past, to July 2, 1863, the

greatest day of his life. He must go back and live it over again. That's what he'd been trying to think of all these weeks. Suddenly a tremendous excitement possessed him.

No one could notice his excitement. His respectful townsmen, watching him while he waited for the automobile which was to take him home, saw only the familiar erect figure of Amos Appleby, wealthy farmer, clad now in the black soft hat and the blue suit, the coat of which was heavy with brass buttons and the pendent star of the Grand Army, hanging from its eagle on his breast. The ghost of a youthful soldierly robustness hung about this man with the gray mustache and the tiny imperial.

But John Allen, his old comrade's grandson, veteran of the Great War and the new husband of his granddaughter, sensed it almost immediately when he drew up his car at the curb.

"Great meetin'," old Amos told him as they climbed the steep mountain road leading to his pleasant farm in Pinefield. "Got through a mess of business and began to figger a little on a trip down to Gettysburg. In a week it'll be sixty years since the battle.

"Son, for years I been wantin' to go back. Ain't seen the old place since I fought there. That's where I got the bay'nit stab that almost finished me.

Would have if your old granddad didn't happen to knock out the Johnny Reb who was after me. He was strong as an offox, John. And you're the dead picture of him.

"Don't see no reason why the three of us, Mary and you and me, couldn't make the trip. You two youngsters ain't really had a honeymoon, what with the work around the farm, though I know you ain't specially hankerin' for it. No young couple cares where they are while marriage is new. Well, we'll ponder it a leetle."

They swung through the gateway of the farm and bumped over the poplarbordered roadway to the rambling white farmhouse, with its climbing ivy vines and its air of hospitality. He descended shakily, bowing under the invisible weight of the heavy years, and as shakily climbed the steps of the wide porch and sank into his own wide wicker chair with its padded seat cushion.

"Mary!" he summoned. "Oh, Mary, what you doin'? Smell some good cookin' goin' on. Bet we'll have a nice supper."

A pleasant, blue-eyed girl with hair of ash came from the house in answer to his summons, wiping floury hands on her gingham apron. Gently she took his cane from his hands and laid it within his reach.

"We're going to have fritters for supper," she said. Her voice was full and throaty. "Was it a nice meeting? And are you tired?"

"Tired!" he growled. "Me tired? Guess you think I'm gettin' old. Goin' on a trip soon."

She glanced at him with keen appraisal. Amos Appleby always said his granddaughter looked him over much as did his wife, the first Mary, long since dead and lying in the small cemetery beside the little white church. Sometimes, as it is with old men, the present grew a little dim. And in such times he thought his granddaughter was his wife, and the tall, silent John Allen, her husband, his stanch comrade who went with him to war and farmed the adjoining farm until his death. "Trip?" she asked. "Who is going on a trip?"

He chuckled. "You and me and John.

Goin' to be your honeymoon. Down to Gettysburg.'

"But we can't leave the farm now." "What's there to do the hired man and girl can't 'tend to?"

"Why" she began, and then remembered that the thick crop of hay, ripened by an extraordinarily hot summer, was even now being cut. The routine work could be performed by the help, just as he said. She went back into the house, already in the grip of plans for the trip.

Amos Appleby sat on his porch, looking over the farm stretching before him. It was alive with growing things. He could see the hayfield, most of the hay still standing, golden and reedlike, slashed through in lines where the mowers had already been at work; and the slaughtered grass lay neat, like rows of soldier dead.

The cattle munched contentedly in the pasture close beyond and the rest of his vision stretched past green clover fields and opulent areas of ripening wheat and oats. The vegetable garden was behind the house, but some of it peeped out at him, the half-brown corn-stalks reminding him, as they always did, of soldiers all in a row. The tomato-vines, the pumpkins, destined to go golden and succulent after the frosts, the parsley beds, the peas and beans and the rest of the vegetables; and beyond the peeping garden, the orchards, like an army corps on parade, green and heavy with concealed and ripening fruit.

The air was heavy-laden with the sweet aroma of growing things, with sights and smells to delight the heart of any farmer. And Amos was a good farmer. But in the glow of that late afternoon he cared little for the things that had hitherto filled his conscientious life. He was listening to an insistent call.

His heart was filled with the prophecy of a coming delight and his mind with plans for a long-deferred journey. In a week he would be in Gettysburg, the scene of the greatest moment in his life.

The boys, he reflected, were marching on the boys who had gone away from all the posts of the country through the years, and the boys who lay wearily down at Gettysburg and Shiloh and Antietam and Vicksburg and all the battle-fields. Fourteen comrades had left Israel Dodge

Post in the last year in flag-draped coffins, to be laid to rest to the firing of volleys and the sweet notes of bugles playing the soldier's lullaby. There were only nineteen left, and they were dropping like leaves in October. Old Father Time was as ruthless as the battle-guns, mowing them down, mowing them down.

He wondered where the dead comrades were and what they were doing. Marching, he reckoned, and cursing their officers for forcing them on; bivouacking and talking over the folks at home and what they would do when the war was over; advancing in fierce charges against the enemy or holding their own positions stubbornly against him.

Amos had his own belief. He believed that all the soldiers of all the wars in which the United States had ever fought occupied a great plain in the Hereafter. There camped the Continentals in their ragged buff and blue, with the stern and beloved Washington at General Headquarters; the soldiers of 1812, General Andrew Jackson, the red-headed and fiery, commanding; under General Winfield Scott, the fighters of the Mexican War, quartered with Sam Houston and his Texans, the gallant defenders of the Alamo; Amos's own with their yelling, chivalrous enemies under General Robert E. Lee, the great tactician and gentleman. And what a galaxy of heroes-Grant, Lee, Meade, Bragg, Rosecrans, Kearny, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, Forrest, Pickett-all of the leaders of the Union and Confederacy, possibly talking it all over. In a newer section, the soldiers of the Boxer Uprising, the Spanish-American War and the Cuban Occupation, with Roosevelt, the statesman, given place here because he was also a great soldier; the youngsters of the Great War, their wounds and a longing for the earth they had just quitted fresh upon them.

They would be visiting and disparaging each other's war, as soldiers ever will. That would be a place worth going to and living in forever and ever. Amos's was no conventional heaven whose inhabitants wore white robes and played on unaccustomed harps and trumpets.

He sighed. He was infinitely weary. So many of his friends and neighbors had gone. He missed John Allen, the closest

friend he had ever had and the man who had saved his life. John's farm, which he had so faithfully worked, lay there, now part of Amos's own, but Amos took no joy in it. He did not think he could go on living were it not that a Great Something was bearing down upon him. When it came he would be weary no more, but would be filled with a great glory. Now there was nothing but loneliness. He was oppressed like a child touched by the grief of the world.

He slipped into the past. He was coming home, an invalid, and he felt his mother's arms about him as she wept, his father's hand upon his shoulder as he lay in bed. His old wound throbbed and he put his hand above his heart to stay it. Good thing that reb's bayonet had not been a little lower. Work, the heavy, heart-breaking work on the farm; the courtship of Mary, his wife, and their sweet homecoming. Wonderful cook, Mary, but apt to be forgetful at times. He wondered if she had churned that butter and gathered the eggs. Taking them into town that afternoon. And he'd asked John Allen to come see him about the sorrel horse John wanted to buy. Ought to be here any minute now. "Mary!" he called. "Mary!" His granddaughter came softly upon the porch.

"That butter ready?"

Her glance was swift and understanding. "Yes, Amos. Just about finished." "Better come into town with me this afternoon and pick out that bonnet. I'll hitch the bays. Wish John Allen'd come. Like to know if he wants that sorrel. John does dawdle sometimes."

"He's here," said the girl as her husband came up.

"John, you goin' to buy that critter? If you ain't, I'll bring him to the dealer. He's takin' up stable room and eatin' me out o' house and home."

A look passed between husband and wife.

"His hock is strained pretty bad," said John, rubbing his chin, "and I think he's a wind-sucker."

"Take 'im or leave 'im."

John cogitated, looked up at the sky, and hemmed and hawed, while the old man furtively watched him.

"I'll take him," he said reluctantly at last, "though I'll bet you're whoppin' me again, Amos. You ain't got no conscience." He was talking as he had heard his grandfather talk. "I'll take him away."

Amos was chuckling softly to himself when the girl stepped over and touched him on the shoulder.

"Supper's ready, Gramp," she said. He slipped back to the present as easily as he had slipped away.

"Eh?" he apologized. "I must ha' been a-dreamin'."

At supper Mary was enthusiastic about the coming trip.

"I'll have to have new clothes," she said. "And I haven't much time to get them in."

"Time enough," Amos assured her. "Long as you got the money."

"Why do you want to go this year?" John asked him.

"Well, it's been a dream o' mine for years," Amos explained. "But one thing and another kept me home. Mostly it was the hayin'. To-day, though, Somethin' come over me. Somethin' kept callin' and callin' to me. Go back to Gettysburg. You got to. You got to.' Maybe it's just a fancy. But it walks right along with what I allus wanted to do. And I'm goin' and you youngsters are goin' with me."

The day had been hot and the red sunset touched the world with magic. Light drenched the pulsing earth, which, like Mary, bride and granddaughter, was approaching its fruition. Tree and flower were in full leaf, at the top of their blooming, from which now there could come only harvest and a falling to the sere. The grass was green on the lawn, golden in the field. Colors fought only to achieve harmony. All over the countryside was riotous fragrance above beating life. The two men sat smoking on the porch. "They're all goin' like the grass out there, both Yanks and Rebs," mused the old man. "The Bible says somethin' about it, somethin' like 'Thy days be numbered.' Down south of the MasonDixon line are old veterans like us up here, just livin' on memories. The fires of the Civil War welded this nation." VOL. LXXXII.-2

Their pipe smoke lifted hazily on the still air and the lowing of cattle came to them. Robins were still foraging for their suppers on the green lawn and singing their evensong among the trees.

"The 2d of July, '63, was a day about like this." Amos broke the silence. "In the fields outside Gettysburg the wheat and the oats and the corn was ripenin'. There never was a peacefuller spot before July the 1st, when Gen'ril Buford, with his four thousand cavalry, and the First and Eleventh Corps held the Rebs till Gen'ril Meade could get his army up 'round Cemetery Ridge. The guns harvested more than green wheat. There was about seven thousand dead on the field. Thus, as the Bible says, it was on the first day when me and your grandpap came up in the 44th New York. We was in Vincent's Brigade of Sykes's Corps and we'd been keepin' 'tween Lee and Washington for a week. Tired? Say, I saw your grandpap go to sleep marchin'."

Amos knocked the ashes from his pipe and laid it beside his chair. Mary slipped out and patted him, but the old man did not heed her. He was living over again his preparations for the battle. John Allen gazed, with eyes hot with their own images of a gray-clad host, speaking a guttural tongue, against which he had fought in the Argonne. A woman's touch must go unheeded here, with the ghost of War hovering about these two veterans: the one in the full strength of his manhood, the other so very old.

"Well," resumed the old soldier, "all that fine long day the two armies just kept a-watchin' each other. Didn't seem like they wanted to start any fightin'. And Lord A'mighty, it was hot. The sun just biled down. Our brigade was lyin' in reserve behind the centre. Gen'ril Daniel E. Sickles, commandin' the left wing, faced the Rebs' right, under Gen'ril Longstreet. Meade ordered Sickles to spread south'ard and connect with Hancock near the bases of the Round Tops, but when he went to take up his position, he found the ground marshy, and he moved his men into high ground on the ridge and into a peach orchard. That left his line overlappin' Hancock's, with a big hole 'tween the forces. And in this hole was Little Round Top.

"Longstreet's cannon opened the battle at four in the afternoon. Then there was hell a-poppin' with bustin' shells and men and horses screamin' with their wounds. The cannonadin' started light and got heavier and heavier. Our guns answered and the sky and earth was full o' death when Longstreet started comin' 'gainst Sickles in line o' battle a mile and a half long.

"Gen'ril Warren, chief engineerin' officer, found Little Round Top unprotected, and he knew what would happen if the Rebs took it. They'd plant artillery there and just naturally crumple the whole left wing. They'd ha' won the battle.

"Even as 'twas, Gen'ril Hood's corps was on its way there with only Warren and a signal corps man to stop 'em. They went to wavin' signal flags to make the Rebs think the hill was occupied. But who ever heard of the Rebs stoppin' because a place was defended? They kept comin' right along.

"We got our marchin' orders 'bout four-thirty, and we moved to support Sickles, who was in danger."

Amos leaned forward, staring into the red sunset and that hectic July day. John Allen's pipe had gone out and he sat immovable, holding it in his hand. Mary grasped her grandfather's wrist.

"Don't excite yourself, Gramp," she pleaded.

She might just as well not have been there. His old eyes were glowing with battle lust and his usually quavering voice had taken on the timbre of youth. "First we knew of Little Round Top," he went on, "was when we see Gen'ril Warren come rushin' down. He talked to Gen'ril Weed, wavin' his arms. Then our brigade, under Colonel Vincent, and part of Gen'ril Weed's force moved up the slope.

"We went on the double, guns loaded and bay'nits fixed, and even then we were only just in time. We beat the Rebs to the crest of the hill and went over at 'em. Fired pointblank at each other and I don't think anybody missed. Didn't have time to reload, and we fought with bay'nits. The ground was rotten with rocks and logs and it was every man for himself.

"In hand-to-hand fightin' a man wants to kill everything in front o' him. I 'member my bay'nit sinking into flesh, but I swan I never did see the man I stabbed. Your grandpap was right 'longside o' me and he went down. I straddled him, hacking and stabbin' till he got on his feet.

"Those consarned Rebs were drivin' us back up the hill. I heard cheerin' and afterwards I found out the 140th New York, under Colonel O'Rorke, had reinforced us. O'Rorke was killed as he got to the summit. But I was too busy right then to notice much. My bay'nit broke and I clubbed my rifle. Felt a head give under the butt, like an egg-shell.

Don't

"Then a big Reb swam at me. know where he come from. Only, first thing I know, there he was, his eyes and mouth wide open and him yellin' fit to raise the dead. He stabbed straight into me and I felt a shock. I tried to hit back with my gun. But it slipped out o' my hand and the ground started spinnin'. He was comin' at me again.

"I'm a goner!' I yelled as I was fallin'.

"Then, John, your grandpap stepped past me. I saw him lunge, and the big Reb disappeared. That's all I remember.

"It's all I remember till I woke up in hospital with a hot, shootin' pain over the heart. They told me we'd held Little Round Top and that your grandpap was all right.”

His voice trailed off and Mary put her arms about him. Twilight had come and deepened. John Allen tapped his pipe against the porch rail, saying no word. Thunder rumbled and heat lightning slashed the fragrant darkness.

Amos, his mind fixed on Gettysburg as is a Mohammedan pilgrim's on Mecca, went into town to make some purchases for the trip. He would travel light, an old campaigner on the march.

"Who is that old fellow?" asked a salesman of Dan Haskins, proprietor of the Gem Tobacco Store, when Amos departed with some of his favorite plug.

"That," Dan replied, "is Amos Appleby. Old soldier. Civil War veteran. Almost killed at Gettysburg. We're