"There's going to be an encampment at Gettysburg, Henrietta. All the state troops is going to be here. It'll be like war-time again. It says here—"
"I like to read the paper my own self, father," said Henrietta, moving briskly away from the door. She felt a sudden anger that it was grandfather who had this great piece of news to tell. "You ain't taken your weeds away from the grass yet, and it's most dinner-time."
Grandfather laid down the paper and went to finish his task. He was accustomed to Henrietta's surliness, and nothing made him unhappy very long. He threw the weeds over the fence and then went back to the porch. So willing was he to forgive Henrietta, and so anxious to tell her more of the exciting news in the paper, that, sitting on the steps, he read her extracts.
"Ten thousand of 'em, Henrietta. They're going to camp around Pickett's Charge, and near the Codori Farm, and they're going to put the cavalry and artillery near Reynolds Woods, and some regulars are coming, Henrietta. It'll be like war-time. And they're going to have a grand review with the soldiers marchin' before the Governor. The Governor'll be there, Henrietta! And—"
"I don't believe it's true," remarked Henrietta coldly. "I believe it's just newspaper talk."
"Oh, no, Henrietta!" Grandfather spoke with deep conviction. "There wouldn't be no cheatin' about such a big thing as this. The Government'd settle them if they'd publish lies. And—" grandfather rose in his excitement—"there'll be cannons a-boomin' and guns a-firin' and oh, my!" He waved the paper above his head. "And the review! I guess you ain't ever seen so many men together. But I have. I tell you I have. When I laid upstairs here, with the bullet in here"—he laid his hand upon his chest—"I seen 'em goin'." Grandfather's voice choked as the voice of one who speaks of some tremendous experience of his past. "I seen 'em goin'. Men and men and men and horses and horses and wagons. They was millions, Henrietta."
Henrietta did not answer. She said to herself that she had heard the account of grandfather's millions of men millions of times. Wounded at Chancellorsville, and sent home on furlough, he had watched the Confederate retreat from an upper window of the old stone house.
"I woke up in the night, and I looked out," he would say. "Everybody was sleepin' and I crept over to the window. It was raining like"—here grandfather's long list of comparisons failed, and he described it simply—"it was just rain and storm and marchin'. They kept going and going. It was tramp, tramp all night."
"Didn't anybody speak, grandfather?" the children would ask.
"You couldn't hear 'em for the rain," he would answer. "Once in a while you could hear 'em cryin'. But most of the time it was just rain and storm, rain and storm. They couldn't go fast, they—"