Local Leesville hired the Opera-house again, organizing a mass-meeting of protest, and the capitalist papers of the city began clamouring against this meeting.  Was the patriotism and loyalty of Leesville to be affronted by another gathering of sedition and treason?  The Herald told all over again the story of the gallant old Civil War veteran who had risen in his seat and shouted his protest against the incitements of “Jack” Smith, the notorious “red” editor.  The Herald printed a second time the picture of the gallant old veteran in his faded blue uniform, and the list of battles in which he had fought, from the first Bull Run to the last siege of Richmond.  Some farmer passing by handed a copy of this paper to Lizzie, adding that if there was any more treason-talk in this locality there was going to be a lynching bee.  So Jimmie found his wife in tears again.  She was absolutely determined that he should not go to that meeting.  For three days she wept and argued with him, and for a part of three nights.

It would have been comical if it had not been so tragic.  Jimmie would use the old argument, that if he did not succeed in stopping the war, he would be dragged into the trenches and killed.  So, of course, Lizzie would become a pacifist at once.  What right had the war to take Jimmie from her?  The little Jimmies had a right to their father!  All children had a right to their fathers!  But then, after Lizzie had expressed these tearful convictions, Jimmie would say, “All right, then, he must go to that meeting, he must do what he could to prevent the war.”  And poor Lizzie would find herself suddenly confronting the terrors of the police with their clubs and the patriots with their buckets of tar and bags of feathers!  No, Jimmie must not carry on any propaganda, Jimmie must not go to the meeting!  Poor Jimmie would try to pin her down; which way did she want him killed, by the Germans, or by the police and the mobs?  But Lizzie did not want him killed either way!  She wanted him to go on living!

Jimmie would try to arrange a compromise for the present.  He would go to the meeting, but he would promise not to say a word.  But that did not console Lizzie—­she knew that if anything happened, her man would get into it.  No, if he were determined to go, she would go, too,—­even if they had to load the three babies into the perambulator, and push them two or three miles to the trolley!  If Jimmie tried to make a speech, she would hang on to his coat-tails, she would clasp her hands over his mouth, she would throw herself between him and the clubs of the policemen!