“Let me see ’em!  I’ve got to see ’em go by!” she pleaded, trying to rise from her chair alone when she heard the fife, and the women helped her to the door, and held her so that she could stand and wait.  She had been an old woman when the war began; she had sent sons and grandsons to the field; they were all gone now.  As the men came by, she straightened her bent figure with all the vigor of youth.  The fife and drum stopped suddenly; the colors lowered.  She did not heed that, but her old eyes flashed and then filled with tears to see the flag going to salute the soldiers’ graves.  “Thank ye, boys; thank ye!” she cried, in her quavering voice, and they all cheered her.  The cheer went back along the straggling line for old Grandmother Dexter, standing there in her front door between the lilacs.  It was one of the great moments of the day.

The few old people at the poor-house, too, were waiting to see the show.  The keeper’s young son, knowing that it was a day of festivity, and not understanding exactly why, had put his toy flag out of the gable window, and there it showed against the gray clapboards like a gay flower.  It was the only bit of decoration along the veterans’ way, and they stopped and saluted it before they broke ranks and went out to the field corner beyond the poor-farm barn to the bit of ground that held the paupers’ unmarked graves.  There was a solemn silence while Asa Brown went to the back of Tighe’s wagon, where such light freight was carried, and brought two flags, and he and John Stover planted them straight in the green sod.  They knew well enough where the right graves were, for these had been made in a corner by themselves, with unwonted sentiment.  And so Eben Munson and John Tighe were honored like the rest, both by their flags and by great and unexpected nosegays of spring flowers, daffies and flowering currant and red tulips, which lay on the graves already.  John Stover and his comrade glanced at each other curiously while they stood singing, and then laid their own bunches of lilacs down and came away.

Then something happened that almost none of the people in the wagons understood.  Martin Tighe’s boy, who played the fife, had studied well his part, and on his poor short-winded instrument now sounded taps as well as he could.  He had heard it done once in Alton at a soldier’s funeral.  The plaintive notes called sadly over the fields, and echoed back from the hills.  The few veterans could not look at each other; their eyes brimmed up with tears; they could not have spoken.  Nothing called back old army days like that.  They had a sudden vision of the Virginian camp, the hillside dotted white with tents, the twinkling lights in other camps, and far away the glow of smouldering fires.  They heard the bugle call from post to post; they remembered the chilly winter night, the wind in the pines, the laughter of the men.  Lights out!  Martin Tighe’s boy sounded it again sharply.  It seemed as if poor Eb Munson and John Tighe must hear it too in their narrow graves.