The Land of Long Ago

by Eliza Calvert Hall

The Lord is my shepherd, my guardian and guide;
Whatsoever I want he will kindly provide,
Ever since I was born, it is he that hath crowned
The life that he gave me with blessings all round.
. . . . . . . .
Thro' my tenderest years, with as tender a care,
My soul like a lamb in his bosom he bare;
To the brook he would lead me, whene'er I had need
And point out the pasture where best I might feed.
. . . . . . . .
The Lord is my shepherd; what then shall I fear?
What danger can frighten me whilst he is near?
Not when the time calls me to walk through the vale
Of the Shadow of Death shall my heart ever fail;
Tho' afraid, of myself, to pursue the dark way
Thy rod and thy staff be my comfort and stay,
For I know by thy guidance, when once it is past,
To a fountain of life it will lead me at last.

She sang it to the cheerful tune of Hinton, as oft before when Parson Page had given it out from the pulpit of Goshen church, and she and Abram sat side by side singing from the weather-beaten hymnal that lay now near the Bible on the centre-table. I took it up and turned its yellow pages, wondering at the queer "buckwheat" notes and reading the names of the old church music, "Federal Street," whose tones beat the air like the wing of a tired and home-sick angel; "Windham," that holds in its minor strains the melancholy wails of an autumn wind; "Brattle Street," whose rich full chords are like a confession of faith,—all those old tunes that have grown richer and sweeter by carrying heavenward on the wings of song the devotion of worshipping souls.

Suddenly Aunt Jane's voice ceased in the middle of a word. I looked up. She was sitting motionless, holding in her hand a piece of rusty iron and gazing at it with tragic eyes. As she gazed, that which had been its sheath fell from it in flakes, and there before us, wasted to half its size by the dampness of years, was the dull ghost of a bayonet that once had glittered in the sun's rays on many a southern battle field.

"It's that old bayonet," she said, slowly and sadly. "I ricollect the day Abram plowed it up and brought it to the house. The soldiers camped all around our place durin' the war, and to this day you can't run a furrow without turnin' up a minie-ball or an old canteen or somethin' o' the sort to carry you back to war times and make your heart ache for days to come."

She ran her finger slowly down the bayonet, laying it against the point, while the lines in her face deepened under the shadow of bitter memories.

"To think," she said at last, "that human bein's made in the image o' God, men and brothers, would make a thing like this to use against each other! The longer I live, child, the stranger that war seems to me. I couldn't understand it before it come nor while it was goin' on, and now, after all these years, it's jest as mysterious as it ever was. You know it begun in the spring, the war did, and there's a certain kind o' spring wind and the way the air smells that takes me back to the day when the news come to Goshen that Fort Sumter'd been fired on; and if I was to live to be as old as Methuselah, I don't reckon there'd ever be a spring that wouldn't bring back the spring of '61.

"The comin' of war is a curious thing, child. You know how it is when you're sittin' in the house or on the porch of a summer's day doin' some piece o' work and thinkin' about nothin' but that work, and the sun'll be shinin' out doors and everything pretty and peaceful, and all at once you'll look up and notice that it's gittin' dark, and you'll hear a little thunder away off yonder in the hills, and before you're ready for it, why the storm's broke and the rain's beatin' in at the windows and doors and the wind's blowin' through the house and carryin' everything before it. Well, that's the way the war come. You've seen the seal o' this State, haven't you, child?—two men standin' together holdin' each other's hands, and the motto around 'em: 'United we stand; divided we fall.' Well, that's jest the way it was in Kentucky before the war come and sp'iled it all. Kentuckians stood together and loved each other, and nobody ever thought they could be divided. But all of a sudden a change come over everybody. Folks that'd been friendly all their lives stopped speakin' to each other; if two neighbors come together and stopped to talk, there'd be high words between 'em, and they'd both be mad when they parted. Out in our neighborhood, instead o' talkin' about the weather and the crops and folks' health and the sermon they'd heard Sunday and the weddin's that were goin' to be, why, it was nothin' but slavery and secession and union and States' rights, and it looked like there was a two-edged sword in every house.

"Father was mighty fond o' readin'. He took two or three papers, and every Sunday mornin' and on their way back home from town the neighbors'd drop in and hear the news; and any time you'd pass his house you'd see a porch full o' men listenin' to Father readin' a speech that somebody'd made in Congress or in the legislature, and Mother, she'd leave her work and come to the door every now and then and listen and, maybe, put in a word.

"I ricollect hearin' Father talk about Crittenden's big speech, the one made in Congress when he was tryin' to head off the war. Father thought pretty near as much of Crittenden as he did of Clay. There never was a speech o' Crittenden's that he didn't read, and he'd say, 'I'd rather handle words like that man does than to be the King of England; and,' says he, 'it's all jest like he says; Kentucky will stand by the Union and die by the Union.' Says he, 'She couldn't do otherwise without goin' back on her own word, and that word's cyarved in stone too. There it is,' says he, 'on the block o' marble that we sent to help build the monument at Washington:

"'The first state to enter the union will be the last to leave it.'