Blow while my little boy wears a tin star,
And rides a stick-horse to a little boy's war.
Blow for the brave man my dream-boy would be,
Blow back his tears when he wakes up to see
His knight errant gone and instead—only me.
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
Blow for a little boy lying forlorn,
Asleep where his life wanders out of the morn.
In a small town, every man who has been in the community long enough to become thoroughly known to the townsmen has a place in the human mosaic; that place seldom changes. Occasionally a man is a year in finding his place. The town of Willow Creek located Calhoun Perkins in two days. Wednesday he arrived in town with his son, whom he called "Bud;" Thursday night it was reported that he had been fishing the second time. That settled it. After that the boasting of Perkins about his family in Tennessee and his assertion that he expected to go into business only made the men laugh when Perkins left a group of them. They were not interested in Perkins by the following Saturday; and Monday every man in the town felt that his judgment of a man who would go fishing every day had been handsomely vindicated, when it was learned that Perkins had served in the Confederate army. When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as "no-'count." In the third spring, after a winter's tussle with rheumatism, Perkins died. His funeral was of so little importance that none of the corpulent old ladies in black alpaca, holding their handkerchiefs carefully folded in their hands, came panting across the town to attend it. No women came at all. And the Perkins boy stood by stolidly while the dry clods were rumbling upon the pine box in the grave. The boy wished to be alone, and he would not sit on the seat with the driver. He wiped a little moisture from his eyes, and rode to town with his feet hanging out of the back of the wagon that had held the coffin.