I found his mixed metaphors so diverting that I was near forgetting the ruined head-piece, and the inexorable necessity of confession.
Sobering under the thought, I let him go on, lending but half an ear, yet, in seeming, bowed by the weight of his discourse. Moved by my mournful silence, he stopped midway.
“I beg your pardon if my feelings and patriotism have carried me too far. I own that I am hot-headed—”
Another such chance would not come in a life-time. I broke his sentence short.
“Oh, I am glad to know that! For my boy has filled your hat with iced water!”
Eheu! That night’s supper was the last merry meal the old home was to know for many a long month and year. For, by breakfast-time next day, the news had come of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and men’s hearts were hot within them, and women’s hearts were failing them for fear of battle, murder, and sudden death to sons, husbands, and brothers.
One might have fancied that a visible pall hung over the city, so universal and deep was the agony of suspense.
While the recollection of suspense and agony was fresh in my mind, I wrote of the awful awakening from my fool’s paradise of incredulity and levity:
“For two days, the air was thick with rumors of war and bloodshed. For two days, the eyes and thoughts of the nation were fixed upon that fire-girt Southern island, with its brave but feeble garrison—the representative of that nation’s majesty—testifying, in the defiant boom of every cannon’s answer to the rebel bombardment, that resistance to armed treason is henceforward to be learned as one of the nation’s laws. For two days, thousands and hundreds of thousands of loyal hearts all over this broad land, cried mightily unto our country’s God to avert this last and direst trial—the humiliation of our Flag by hands that once helped to rear it in the sight of the world, as the ensign of national faith. And under the whole expanse of heaven, there was no answer to those prayers, except the reverberation of the cruel guns.