Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/35

 to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.

The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia, chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a Confederate victory by parading up-town with a butternut badge on her bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing of her temerity, went up-town in desperation and in fear that she might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as a figure in the picture—though of course the statue could not have been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they