Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying—the telling of such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it up.
It wouldn’t go over—not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.
He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely one,” he sighs inwardly.
The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order, and he makes it, with a flourish.
Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and editor of the Chicago Tribune” he explains.
And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war, he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he—well, to tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes. “Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”
And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.
One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.
What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father, but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the words of the noble Lincoln.
And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had finally joined the Union forces.