The Warchester press, known for many years as the most sprightly and enterprising of the country, was too much taken up with the direful news from Baltimore to even make a note of Jack Sprague’s expulsion, and the soldier boy was spared that mortification.  Nor did he meet the tearful lament and heart-broken remonstrance at home, to which he had looked forward with lively dread.  His friends in the village of Acredale were so astonished by his blue regimentals that he reached the homestead door unquestioned.  His mother, at the dining-room window, caught sight of the uniform, and did not recognize her son until she was almost smothered in his hearty embrace.

“Why, John!  What does this mean?  What—­what have you on?”

“Mother, I am twenty-two years old.  A man who won’t fight for his country isn’t a good son.  He has no right to stay in a country that he isn’t willing to fight for!” and with this specious dictum he drew himself up and met the astonished eyes of his sister Olympia, who had been apprised of his coming.  But the maternal fears clouded patriotic conceptions where her darling was involved, and his mother sobbed: 

“O Jack, Jack! what shall we do?  How can we live without you!  And oh, my son, you are too young to go to the war.  You will break down.  You can’t manage a—­a musket, and the—­the heavy load the soldiers carry.  My son, don’t break your mother’s heart.  Don’t go—­don’t, Jack, Jack!  What shall I do?—­O Polly, what shall we do?”

“What shall we do?  Why, we’ll just show Jack that all of war isn’t in soldiering; that the women who stay at home help the heroes, though they may not take part in the battle.  As to you and me, mamma, we shall be the proudest women in Acredale, for our Jack’s the first—­” she was going to say “boy,” but, catching the coming protest in the warrior’s glowing eye, substituted “man” with timely magnanimity—­“the first man that volunteered from Acredale.  And how shamed you would have been—­we would have been—­if Jack hadn’t kept up the tradition of the family!  He comes naturally by his sense of duty.  Your father’s father was the first to join Gates at Saratoga.  My father’s father was the right hand of Warren, at Bunker Hill!  If ever blood ran like water in our Jack’s veins, I should put on—­trousers and go to the war myself.  I’m not sure that I sha’n’t as it is,” and, affecting Spartan fortitude, Olympia pretended to be deeply absorbed in adjusting a disarranged furbelow in her attire to conceal the quavering in her voice and the dewy something in her dark eyes.  The mother, disconcerted by this defection where she had counted on the blindest adhesion, sank back in the cane rocker, helpless, speechless.

“Yes, mother, Polly is right.  How could you ever lift up your head if it were said that son of John Sprague’s—­Governor, Senator, minister abroad—­was the last to fly to his country’s call?  Why, Jackson would turn in his grave if a son of John Sprague were not the first to take up arms when the Union that he loved, as he loved his life, was in peril!”