"I'll remember. I love to hear about the war. Old Johnny Schlegelmilch from way up the country comes to our place still to sell brooms, and once last summer he came and it began to thunder and storm and pop said he shall stay till it's over and then he told me all about the war. He said our flag's the prettiest in the whole world."
"So it is," solemnly affirmed Old Aaron.
"I wonder if anybody it belongs to could help liking it," said the child, remembering Granny's words.
"Well," the veteran answered slowly, "I knew a young fellow once, a nice fellow he seemed, too, and his father a soldier who fought for the flag. Well, the father was always talking about the flag and what it means and how every man should be ready to fight for it. And one day the boy said that he would never fight for it and be shot to pieces, that the old flag made him sick, and one soldier in the family was enough."
"Oh!" Phœbe opened her eyes wide in surprise and horror.
"And the father told the boy," the old man went on in a fixed voice as though the veriest details of the story were vividly before him, "that if he would not take back those words he never wanted to see him again. It was better to have no son, than such a son, a coward who hated the flag."
Here Granny appeared with the lemonade and the story was abruptly ended. Phœbe refrained from questioning the man about the story but as she sat under the arbor and afterwards, as she started up the street of the little town, she wondered over and over how a boy could be the son of a soldier and hate the flag, and whether the story Old Aaron told her was the story of himself and Nason.
