“I’ll look around while you put Jennie up,” explained Brevet, as soon as Joe had lifted him from the cart, and putting his hands in his pockets he walked up to the big house, straight through the hall, whose doors stood wide open, and out on to the porch in front. Brevet simply loved “to look around,” from that porch, and I do not think he ever stood there without his resolve to be a soldier some day surging up in a strong, new tide within him. Some of the rest of us, who are quite too old ever to think of being soldiers, and whose petticoats must at any age have stood in the way, know exactly how Brevet felt. You know, too, if you have ever been to Arlington, and, having been born and bred in these United States of ours, are the true little American you really ought to be. But in case you never have been to Arlington, and do not at all know why it should make you feel that you would like to be a soldier, then let me tell you before you have read another single line, that Arlington is the great National Cemetery, lying a few miles out from Washington, and where more than fifteen thousand soldiers lie buried. From the moment you enter the beautiful grounds, you see the low mounds stretching away on every side of you, and when you drive up in front of Arlington House itself, there is brave General Sheridan’s tomb right in front of you, so you cannot forget for a moment what a host of noble heroes they were, who fought in our great civil war thirty years ago, and how grand a thing it is lo be willing to lay down one’s life if need be, for the honour of one’s country. But perhaps you wonder that there should be a fine old house in a cemetery, and that Brevet should so love to go there, thinking a cemetery for your part rather sad and depressing, and wonder too why Joe should have chosen such a place for his home; all of which wonders it would take too much time to explain in this chapter, a chapter that was only meant to introduce you to Brevet and the Captain, so good-bye for just now to Arlington.
CHAPTER II.—COURAGE TAKES HEART.
This time, as before, there is a story to tell because of something braved and dared for Miss Julia’s sake; something that needed less nerve, perhaps, than the leap Courage took that night on the drawbridge, but something that called not only for a world of a different sort of courage, but for infinite patience as well, and that claimed the whole summer for its doing. The reason for it all lay in four little words—Miss Julia was dead. Beautiful, strong, radiant Miss Julia! why, no one had thought of death for her, save as years and years away in the serene twilight of a calm old age; and yet it had come, suddenly, after a week’s brief illness, and Courage was simply broken-hearted. She felt she had no right to her name now, and never should have again. Miss Julia had been teacher, mother, friend to her, one or the other almost since her babyhood, and to care for Miss Julia in return, now that she herself was grown up, to let every thing else “come second,” had been her only thought. And now to find her hands suddenly empty, and all the sunshine gone out of her life—was it strange that she felt despairing and desolate and that nothing whatever was left?
“But we are left,” pleaded a chorus of little voices, and Courage seemed to see four brighteyed little children; bright-eyed because God had made them so, but with faces almost as sad as her own. “Yes, we are left,” they continued pleading. “Miss Julia was going to do so much for us this summer; could not you do it in her place for her sake?”
Courage shook her head gravely as in answer to her own thoughts.
“No, I cannot,” she said, firmly. “Everything that I leaned on is gone; nothing is left to me—nothing.”
“But could you not try just for her sake?” chorused the little voices over and over in her heart, day after day, in all the sad hours of waking, and sometimes even in sleeping, until at last she bravely brushed the tears away and made answer, “Yes, for her sake I will!”