“Hi!  Wha—­what’s that you said?”

“Killed in honorable battle—­Snyder, Hiram,” said the postmaster with a forced calmness.

The boy’s father stood up with a jerk.  Then he sat down.  Then he stood up again and staggered his way to the door and fumbled for the latch like a blind man.

“God help him! he’s gone to tell the old woman,” said the postmaster as he blew his nose on a red handkerchief.

The preacher preached a funeral sermon for the boy, and on the little pyramid that marked the family lot in the burying-ground they carved the words:  “Killed in honorable battle, Hiram Snyder, aged nineteen.”  Not long after, strange, yellow, bearded men in faded blue began to arrive.  Great welcomes were given them; and at the regular Wednesday evening prayer-meeting thanksgivings were poured out for their safe return, with names of company and regiment duly mentioned for the Lord’s better identification.  Bees were held for some of these returned farmers, where twenty teams and fifty men, old and young, did a season’s farm-work in a day, and split enough wood for a year.  At such times the women would bring big baskets of provisions, and long tables would be set, and there were very jolly times, with cracking of many jokes that were veterans, and the day would end with pitching horseshoes, and at last with singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

It was at one such gathering that a ghost appeared—­a lank, saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow—­wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman’s overcoat with no coat beneath it.  The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top of a freight-car that was near the engine.

This ghost was Hiram Snyder.

All forgave him the shock of surprise he caused us—­all except the minister who had preached his funeral sermon.  Years after I heard this minister remark in a solemn, grieved tone:  “Hiram Snyder is a man who can not be relied on.”

* * * * *

As the years pass, the miracle of the seasons means less to us.  But what country boy can forget the turning of the leaves from green to gold, and the watchings and waitings for the first hard frost that ushers in the nutting season!  And then the first fall of snow, with its promise of skates and sleds and tracks of rabbits, and mayhap bears, and strange animals that only come out at night, and that no human eye has ever seen!

Beautiful are the seasons; and glad I am that I have not yet quite lost my love for each.  But now they parade past with a curious swiftness!  They look at me out of wistful eyes, and sometimes one calls to me as she goes by and asks, “Why have you done so little since I saw you last?” And I can only answer, “I was thinking of you.”

I do not need another incarnation to live my life over again.  I can do that now, and the resurrection of the past, through memory, that sees through closed eyes, is just as satisfactory as the thing itself.