brought back to him instantly the memory of a little country town in the South at which, on his way to and from college, he had stopped a dozen times at just this hour. The name of the town was Creasman, there was a small sectarian school there which was known as Creasman College, and it had become traditional with the university students, who crowded the train on their journeys home or back to college, to thrust their heads out of the windows and howl with the derisive arrogance of youth: “Whoopee, girls! Creasman College!”
And this sally was usually answered by similar jibes and jeers from the group of students, townsfolk and country people who crowded the platform of the station “to see the train come through.”
In this Frenchman’s taunts and jeers, and in the way the people at the stations answered him, as well as in all the traffic of noisy, muddy, talking and gesticulating people who streamed in and out of the train at every halt, there was, in spite of all the local differences, the same essential quality that had characterized the halts at the little town set there upon the vast, raw Piedmont of the South.
Moreover, there was in the tone and texture of the Frenchman’s voice—at once so actual, living, and familiar in its high, sanguinary energy, and so foreign, alien, and troubling to a stranger’s ear—the whole warmth and vitality of centuries of living, a quality which brought the ancient past of Europe, and of France, to life, as the pages of history could never do.
In the same way the boy had long ago discovered that a single tone or shading in his mother’s or his father’s voice could touch the lost past of America—the past of the Civil War, the strange mysteries of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, which is, for most Americans, more far and strange in time than the Crusades—and bring it instantly into life.
Thus he had never gained a living image of the Civil War until he heard his mother speak of it one day. Until that time all his efforts to recapture that lost time out of the pages of books had been futile; the men, the battles, the generals, and the lives of all the people existed in a world of legendary unreality, and seemed, in fact, as different from the world he knew as if they had existed on a separate planet. And then one day he heard his mother—who had been only five years old when the war ended—describe the return of the troops along a country road near home. She told how the dust rose from the ragged feet of weary marching men and of how she sat upon her father’s shoulder as
