of their own, could excuse themselves for forgetting him the year round, and even call him shiftless.  But there were none to look askance at Martin Tighe on Decoration Day, as he sat in the wagon, with his bleached face like a captive’s, and his thin, afflicted body.  He stretched out his whole hand impartially to those who had remembered and those who had forgotten both his courage at Fredericksburg and his sorry need in Barlow.

Henry Merrill had secured the engine company’s large flag in Alton, and now carried it proudly.  There were eight men in line, two by two, and marching a good bit apart, to make their line the longer.  The fife and drum struck up gallantly together, and the little procession moved away slowly along the country road.  It gave an unwonted touch of color to the landscape,—­the scarlet, the blue, between the new-ploughed fields and budding roadside thickets, between the wide dim ranges of the mountains, under the great white clouds of the spring sky.  Such processions grow more pathetic year by year; it will not be so long now before wondering children will have seen the last.  The aging faces of the men, the renewed comradeship, the quick beat of the hearts that remember, the tenderness of those who think upon old sorrows,—­all these make the day a lovelier and a sadder festival.  So men’s hearts were stirred, they knew not why, when they heard the shrill fife and the incessant drum along the quiet Barlow road, and saw the handful of old soldiers marching by.  Nobody thought of them as familiar men and neighbors alone,—­they were a part of that army which had saved its country.  They had taken their lives in their hands and gone out to fight for their country, plain John Stover and Jesse Dean and the rest.  No matter if every other day in the year they counted for little or much, whether they were lame-footed and lagging, whether their farms were of poor soil or rich.

The little troop went in slender line along the road; the crowded country wagons and all the people who went afoot followed Martin Tighe’s wagon as if it were a great gathering at a country funeral.  The route was short, and the long, straggling line marched slowly; it could go no faster than the lame men could walk.

In one of the houses by the roadside an old woman sat by a window, in an old-fashioned black gown, and clean white cap with a prim border which bound her thin, sharp features closely.  She had been for a long time looking out eagerly over the snowberry and cinnamon-rose bushes; her face was pressed close to the pane, and presently she caught sight of the great flag as it came down the road.