“Come on, Mr. Spencer, and do your talking while we work,� laughed Patsy. “Come on! You may be our overseer and boss the job.�
Before the morning was half over, however, they deposed him. Why, he wanted them to stop and rest every few minutes; at that rate, it would be cotton-picking time before they finished chopping the crop! So they elected David foreman.
Sweet William, as water boy, trotted back and forth to supply cool drinks; and about the middle of the forenoon, he proudly invited the workers to a surprise luncheon, where each had half a dozen delicious little wild strawberries on a sycamore-leaf plate.
At noon they rested and ate their picnic dinner in the grove at the spring. Evening found them healthily and happily tired, and they went gladly back to work the next day. Thursday brought showers that gave them a rest and made the freshly worked crop grow like magic. By noon on Saturday, they finished hoeing the cotton and, for the time at least, the crop was saved.
On Saturday afternoon, the young workpeople loafed like real farmers; for, according to rural custom, that day was a sort of secular Sabbath on which the men of the community rested from all their labors and gathered sociably in the post office or on Court-house Green.
What wonderful things they had to talk about these days!
Mr. Blair read the account in his daily paper of the Confederate Reunion at Washington and the President’s Arlington speech. The old soldiers chuckled at hearing that foreigners, seeing the Stars and Bars displayed alongside the Allies’ flags, asked wonderingly, “What flag is that? What new nation has entered the war?� They straightened their stooped old shoulders at the description of their ten thousand comrades, in gray suits and broad hats, marching along the Avenue. And they said, with a sigh, that the story was as good—almost—as being there.
Then they rehearsed tales of their battles and marches and sieges, and compared old feats with new.
Those brilliant Canadian drives were like Jackson’s charges. And like one of his messages was Foch’s telegram to Joffre in the battle of the Marne: “The enemy is attacking my flank; my rear is threatened; I am, therefore, attacking in front.�
The heroic, hopeless, glorious Gallipoli campaign—ah! it was the epitome of their War of Secession. As long as the world honors high courage and stanch devotion to a desperate cause, it will remember those men who, like the Franks in the old story of Roland, beat off army after army and died, defeated by their own victories, “triumphing over disaster and death.�