Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/139

 brave old lips trembled slightly as they touched his. But whether she had said the word good-bye or had failed to say it he did not know.

In his breast pocket was a neat little penwiper, the covering worked in red, white, and blue worsteds in the shape ofa flag, and in yellow silk were done "all the stars for all the States," little Mary had said when she gave it to him. "And you must use it, Father, when you write to us, and when you bring it home again it will have come true, and all the States will be in the Union, just as they used to be."

He had taken the child's face between his two large hands, and looked down with infinite wistfulness into the clear young eyes.

"Mary," he had said, "I wish you and I had known each other a little better."

"Never mind, Father," the girlish treble sounded sweet and true as a bell. "When we meet again we shall be great friends."

Then he had kissed her forehead and held her very close, and she had stroked the front of his coat, the Union coat that he was to do his fighting in, until her mother came and claimed her right to weep upon his shoulder.

He thought of his clear-eyed, high-hearted little daughter, as he sat among the men of his company on the eve of the first great disaster of Bull Run and again as he went into action the next day.

The bullet that pierced his heart passed first through the little worsted flag, but it left the field