“But she does,” said Harry, quickly “Mother doesn’t think it right for us to start on such an expedition and she says all parents will say the same.”

“Of all things, where can the harm be?  Only none of the rest of us have to ask leave, as you do.”

“Mother,” said Harry, disregarding this speech, “is of the opinion that to enter a man’s garden by the back gate, when the family are all away, is breaking into his premises and going where you haven’t a right, and is burglary, and if you take flowers or anything, then it’s stealing.  Mere vulgar stealing, she says.”

“Why, Harry Pemberton, how dare you say stealing to me?” And Frank’s red hair stood up like a fiery flame.

“I’m only quoting mother.  Don’t get mad, Frank.”

“Does your mother know it’s to decorate the soldiers’ graves that we want the flowers, and that Squire Eliot won’t be home till next year, and there are hundreds ’n hundreds of flowers fading and wasting and dying on his lawn and garden, and furthermore that he’d like the fellows to decorate the cemetery with his flowers?  Does she know that, I say?” and the blue-eyed lad gesticulated fiercely.

“All is,” replied Harry, firmly, “that you boys can go ahead if you like, but mother won’t let me, and you must count me out.”

“All is,” said Frank, mimicking Harry’s tone, “you’re a mother-boy, and we fellows won’t have anything more to do with you.”  So they sent him to Coventry, which means that they let him alone severely.  They had begun to do it already, which was why he whistled so merrily to show he did not mind.

I never for my part could see that there was any disgrace in being a mother-boy.  But I suppose a boy thinks he is called babyish, if the name is fastened on him.  As Harry went on his errand, he no longer whistled, at least he didn’t whistle much.  And as he went to school next day, and next day, and next day, and found himself left out in the cold, he would have been more than the usual twelve-year-old laddie if he had not felt his courage fail.  But he had his motto text to bolster him up.

“Clean hands, Harry, and a pure heart,” said Mrs. Pemberton, cheerfully.  “It cannot be right to steal flowers or anything else even to decorate the graves of our brave soldiers.”

And so the time passed—­kite time, top time, hoop time, marble time.

It was the evening before Memorial Day, at last.

There was a good deal of stirring in the village.  It was splendid moonlight.  You could see to read large print.  A whole crowd of boys met at the store and took their way across lots to the beautiful old Eliot place.  The big house, with its broad porch and white columns, stood out in the glory of the moon.  The gardens were sweet in the dew.  Violets, lilies, roses, lilacs, snow-drops, whole beds of them.

Every boy, and there were ten of them, had a basket and a pair of shears.  They meant to get all the flowers they could carry and despoil the Eliot place, if necessary, to make the cemetery a grand looking spot to-morrow, when the veterans and the militia should be out with bands of music and flying flags, and the Governor, no less, coming in person to review the troops and make a speech in the very place where his own father was buried.