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Chairs were placed close together around the walls of that G. A. R. hall, and every chair was squired by a big spittoon. There was a silken flag, fringed with stiff blue cords, a fine thing that stirred me every time I saw it uncased. There were stacks of muskets, with their bayonets fixed, in each corner of the room. There were rusty shell fragments, and on the walls big pictures of Lincoln, General Grant and others. The drum corps, the sound of drums, seemed to take me by the throat. I stamped around that hall behind my father until he fixed into my blood the rhythm of the beat for marching men. It seems as if I hear his voice and see the dust rise from the floor as he marked the time with his big foot and called out, "one step, one step, one step."

Most of the adult railroad workers of our town had been in the war. All the pain had leached out of their days of glory. They wore their uniforms on important occasions and gave one another military titles until there seemed to be no privates in the hall. They chewed tobacco, spat and yarned. What they all attempted in their yarning was to evoke the past, but my father had a skill that could really do this thing. With drumsticks and a drum, he could make them all sit straighter, make their eyes shine as they remembered.