Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/322

312 the hall in the morning. Some one had to prepare the room for the workers, who, children sent off to school, breakfast dishes washed, beds made, and to-day's sweeping crammed in with to-morrow's baking, began to troop in about ten o'clock.

There had been seventeen men drafted from Ridgefield in the first call. There had been over twice that number who had volunteered. The fifty-three Ridgefield boys with the colors had been like hot burning coals beneath a melting-pot to their home-town. There had been a welding together of sympathies in Ridgefield such as had not been known there since '62. The son of Mr. Horween, who sat at a mahogany desk in the luxurious general manager's office of the Ridgefield Wire Company, was a tentmate of the son of Hans Bergstrom, who ran a lathe in the same concern; and Mrs. Horween and Mrs. Bergstrom sat many a morning side by side in the Ridgefield town-hall, folding gauze, rolling bandages, and comparing knitting stitches. The local orators in their speeches referred to the Ridgefield men in their country's service as "Our boys." How it made one thrill—fight to keep the tears back—"Our boys!" Rich or poor, native or foreign-born, conscript or volunteer, private or officer, commissioned or non-commissioned, each and every one of them—ours—to hope for, to pray for, to work for, to be proud of; the life of each mother's son of them of equal value, the sympathy for each son's mother of them left behind to wait and watch of equal tenderness and depth.

The same women, who but a few months before had sat in their own front-rooms, in their own rocking-chairs, embroidering their own center-pieces, glancing