“‘No, no, Mother, please don’t!’ I cried. ‘Aunt Louisa said not to dye it. She said it would become me the way it is.’
“‘Tush, tush!’ said Mother severely, ‘You are too little to talk of things becoming you.’ But she didn’t dye it, and a few weeks later at sister Belle’s wedding I wore the yellow dress made just the way Aunt Louisa said to make it.
“And now, ‘To bed, to bed, says sleepy head,’ and we’ll have another story some other night.”
A WAR STORY
“Well, well,” said Grandma one evening when Bobby and Alice and Pink came to her room for their usual bedtime story, “I don’t know what to tell you about tonight.”
“Tell us a war story,” suggested Bobby eagerly.
“Maybe I might tell you a war story,” agreed Grandma, “a war story of a time long ago.” And she picked up her knitting and began slowly:
“When the Civil War broke out I was a very little girl. Of course there had been lots of talk of war, but the first thing I remember about it was when we heard that Fort Sumter had been fired on. It was a bright, sunshiny morning in the spring. I was helping Father rake the dead leaves off the garden when I saw a man coming up the road on horseback. I told Father, and he dropped his rake and went over to the fence. In those days it wasn’t as it is now. News traveled slowly—no telephones, no trains, no buggies. And this young man, who had been to Clayville to get his marriage license, brought us the news that Fort Sumter had been fired on.
“Father went straight into the house to tell Mother, and after a while he and my big brother, Joe, saddled their horses and rode away. I thought they were going right off to war and started to cry, and then I laughed instead when our big Dominique rooster flew up on the hen-house roof, flapped his wings, and crowed and crowed. A great many men and boys rode by our house that day on their way to Clayville, and when Father and Joe came back next day Joe had volunteered and been accepted and he stayed at home only long enough to pack his clothes and say good-by to us.