"God bless you, my boy!"
And pushing his way through the crowd, my father plunges into the stage, not able to wait until it has driven around to the house; and if his voice is husky with emotion, as he often repeats "God bless you, my boy!" and gets his arm around my neck, is it any wonder?
But my dog Rollo can't get into the stage, and so he runs barking after it, and is the first to greet me at the gate, and jumps up at me with his great paws on my shoulders. Does he know me? I rather think he does!
Then mother and sisters come around, and they must needs call for a lamp and hold it close to my face, and look me all over from head to foot, while father is saying to himself again and again, "God bless you, my boy!"
Although I knew that my name was never forgotten in the evening prayer all the while I was away, yet not once, perhaps, in all that time was father's voice so choked in utterance as when now, his heart overflowing, he came to give thanks for my safe return. And when I lay down that night in a clean white bed, for the first time in three long years, I thanked God for Peace and Home.
And—Andy? Why—the Lord bless him and his!—he's a soldier still. For, having laid aside the blue, he put on the black, being a sober, steady-going Presbyterian parson now, somewhere up in York State. I haven't seen him for years; but when we do meet, once in a great while, there is such a wringing of hands as makes us both wince until the tears start, and we sit up talking over old times so far into the night that the good folk of the house wonder whether we shall ever get to—
THE END.