CHAPTER III HIS GRANDFATHER Meanwhile Victor Hardy was sitting erect in his seat, unconsciously assuming a military stiffness of pose, with the very strangest emotions of his uneventful young life burning his heart within him. He tingled with the remembrance of the glance that Amy Carruth had given him. So vaguely that 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 sword in a scabbard most of the time, but comes out flashing mightily in the hour of peril; he realized it was not only love of the fair heritage on earth bequeathed by the fathers; it was not land or gear, it was not even the kindly people of his blood who lived about him; but it was the men of all the past whose heroism had not been in vain, the gaunt pioneers who fought hunger and the savages; the men at Valley Forge who limped through the snow with their worn shoes and their bleeding feet; the brave lads on sea or shore who fought in the Civil War, whose sacrifice and heroism belong to us all equally whether they wore blue or gray; the lads just as brave who sickened and died in the fever camps of the Spanish War; it meant all the past. And it meant the future. "That's what the flag means, son," he could hear his grandfather's voice and the tap of his wooden heel as he prodded his emotion home on the cement walk. "That's what the flag means, everything; all we fought for in the past; all we work for to-day, |