“Did you attend Professor Merryweather's lecture last evening, Mrs. Hyde?” asked Frank, adjusting his eye-glasses and fixing Jessie with that intensity of look by which old persons have to make up for their failing eyesight. “The hall was so near your house, I did n't know but you would feel like venturing out.”
“My daughters insisted on my taking advantage of the opportunity, it is so seldom I go anywhere of an evening,” replied Jessie, “and I was very much interested, though I lost a good deal owing to the carrying on of a young couple in front of me. When I was a girl, young folks didn't do their courting in public.”
Mary had not heard of the lecture, and Frank explained that it was one of the ter-semi-centennial course on American society and politics fifty years ago.
“By the way,” remarked George, “did you observe what difficulty they are having in finding enough survivors of the civil war to make a respectable squad. The papers say that not over a dozen of both armies can probably be secured, and some of the cases are thought doubtful at that.”
“Is it possible!” said Henry. “And yet, too, it must be so; but it sounds strangely to one who remembers as if it were yesterday seeing the grand review of the Federal armies at Washington just after the war. What a host of strong men was that, and now scarcely a dozen left. My friends, we are getting to be old people. We are almost through with it.”
Henry sat gazing into vacancy over the tops of his spectacles, while the old ladies wiped theirs and sniffed and sighed a little. Finally Jessie said:—
“Those were heroic days. My little granddaughters never tire of hearing stories about them. They are strong partisans, too. Jessie is a fierce little rebel and Sam is an uncompromising Unionist, only they both agree in denouncing slavery.”
“That reminds me,” said Frank, smiling, “that our little Frankie came to me yesterday with a black eye he got for telling Judge Benson's little boy that people of his complexion were once slaves. He had read it in his history, and appealed to me to know if it was n't true.”
“I 'm not a bit surprised that the little Benson boy resented the imputation,” said George. “I really don't believe that more than half the people would be certain that slavery ever existed here, and I 'm sure that it rarely occurs to those who do know it. No doubt that company of old slaves at the centennial—that is, if they can find enough survivors—will be a valuable historical reminder to many.”
“Dr. Hays,” said Nellie, “will you settle a question between Mrs. Hyde and myself? Were you in C———, it was then only a village, along between 1870 and '80, about forty or fifty years ago?”