And the Captain Answered

hat no nerve apprised him of its significance he felt himself enhanced in his own self-esteem. He was a diffident lad who rated himself too low as naturally as many young men rate themselves too high. Even now he would not admit in his reverie that the girl who had always been the one girl to him had looked on him with a glint of admiration in her kindliness ; yet he felt it in every fiber of him. And he felt it was because he was a soldier. "She loves our country, too," he thought. His grandfather's image never forgotten, nor even greatly dimmed by the years, came to him in the distinctness of his childish vision. Words and phrases only faintly comprehended were illuminated into their real meaning, though not distinctly enough for words of his own. He understood the old soldier's ardor. He could see the lights twinkling and fading among the trees on the dark hillsides. They seemed to mean to him not merely homes of his fellow townsmen, some stately, some humble; but all the kindly, neighborly habit of American life, the good offices in trouble or sickness, the sympathy, the homely cheer, the humorous comfort if a man was discouraged, all the open-hearted friendliness in whose warmth he had grown to manhood, feeling it but not thinking about it; and his heart swelled with a new affection for it all. At the same breath he recalled his grandfather's words; he realized what is love of country, that mystical, misunderstood, misused emotion which rests like a swo...