“Oh, I’ll bring home glory.  Napoleon said that every soldier carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.”

“I’m afraid you won’t have room for it if you carry all the things that I know of intended for you in this and other families.”

“Yes; but, Polly, you know, or perhaps you don’t know, a baton is like a college love—­no matter how full your heart is, you can always find room for another!”

“John,” Mistress Sprague reproves mildly; “how can you?  I don’t like to hear my son talk like that even in jest.  Don’t get the idea that it is soldierly to treat sacred things with levity.  Love is a very sacred thing; it ought to be part of a man’s religion; it was of your father’s.”

“Then Jack must be a high priest, for there are a dozen girls here and in the city who believe themselves enshrined in that elastic heart.”

“Olympia, you are a baleful influence on your brother.  If anything could reconcile me to his going it is the thought that he will escape the extraordinary speech and manners you have brought back from New York.  Do the Misses Pomfret graduate all their young ladies with such a tone and laxity of speech as you have lately shown?  Strangers would naturally think that you had no training at home.”

“Don’t fear, mamma; strangers are not favored with my lighter vein; I assume that for you and Jack, to keep your minds from graver things.  I preserve the senatorial suavity of speech and the Sprague austerity of manner ‘before folks,’ as Aunt Merry would say.  Which reminds me, Jack, Kitty Moore declares that you are responsible for Barney’s enlisting.  The family look to you to bring him home safe—­a colonel at least.”

“Well, by George, I like that!  Why, the beggar was bent on going long ago.  He was the first to ask me to run away and enlist.  The other day he wanted me to have him sworn in, and I told him to wait until—­until I got a commission.”  Jack was going to say until he was older, but he suddenly recollected that Barney was his own age, and that, in view of his mother’s argument, struck him as unfortunate.  He saw Olympia smiling mischievously and turned the subject abruptly.  “I suppose you know, Polly, that Vincent is going home to join the rebels?”

“Is he?” She had turned swiftly to gather a ball of worsted, and when it was secured began to rummage in her work-basket for something that seemed from her intentness to be vitally necessary to her at the moment.

“Yes, he wrote to President Grandison that he should go as soon as his passports and remittances came.  He’s promised a captain’s commission.  I’m very, very sorry.  Vint is the noblest of fellows.  I hate to think of him in the rebel army.”

“That’s the reason you half killed him the other day, I suppose,” Olympia said, sweetly, still investigating the contents of the basket.

“What, John, you’ve not been in a broil—­fighting?” and Mistress Sprague could not, even in imagination, go further in such an odious direction, and let her eyes finish the interrogatory.