ON A PORCH 



to be the old porch looming up and overlooking 

 them. Great stalwart sons grew up and took 

 after their full-blooded father. They romped 

 with bare feet on those old boards and got their 

 lessons on rainy days round that low window-sill. 

 They took in the atmosphere of the mother just 

 as they took in the smell of the hot roses that 

 came round the southern corner of the porch. 

 There would be one of them upon whom the 

 mother had set her heart. He was to do as a 

 man what she could not do as a woman ; put into 

 great heroic deeds the self-sacrifice and faith that 

 need muscle and will, and over that particular 

 member of her household she probably wept and 

 prayed when no one saw her. 



But, as the boys grew up, they all straggled 

 off. The very freedom and brightness of the 

 farm life grew monotonous. It offered no chal 

 lenge to hot blood ; so they had to weave their 

 own mazes far away, and the sensitive one, upon 

 whom the hopes had rested like white doves, fell 

 into a youth s tangle, to escape which he ran away 

 and enlisted, being afterward heard of somewhere 

 on the Rio Grande, where he got a brass bullet in 

 his lung. Griselle did not say so, but I under 

 stood well enough that at this crisis he began to 

 smell the hot roses, and wished to be set down on 

 that old porch. Nothing would do but he must 

 speed that same bullet to the heart of his mother. 

 They brought him home from Vera Cruz, and 

 there was quite a cavalcade escorted the carriage 

 up from the village, with a show of flags and a 



