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113 The Oath of Allegiance It was the time of great purposes and small hopes; it was the time of grand deeds and dark dreams; it was the time of glory and madness, of love and despair; it was the time of the greatest motives and the noblest achievement, the truest praying and the bitterest suffering that our land and our day have known.¹ The story which I have to tell, in so far as it is a story at all, is a tale of the war, and therefore not in the fashion. It is in such important particulars true that it may ask a respectful hearing, since, in the matter of which I have to speak, it will be found that the fact rather than the way of putting the fact is the source of interest.² It was the summer of the year 1862, in the New England university town which let us call Bonn upon these pages. The year and the term were at their bloom; the elms were in rich leaf, and stood stately, like unconscious pagan divinities, august, in groups and ranks upon the college greens.The paths were weeded and clean.The grass was long and luxuriant; for this was before it was thought necessary to shave one’s lawn to fighting-cut. The June air melted delicately against the cheek. The proper cultivated flowers grew in the proper places, as such things do in well-directed towns.The white Persian lilac was in blossom in the sedate gardens of the faculty.The well-trimmed honeysuckle clambered over the well-painted porch. The June lilies, in rows, stood decorously dying on the edges of the graveled paths. No one ever did anything indecorously in Bonn,—except, of course, the boys. One of the boys had been dangerously near an indecorum in one of those highly cultivated gardens on the June day of which we speak. It had been a merry day, full of sun and winds and spices, full of the essences of growth and blossom and of reaching on to that larger life which precedes a glowing death; and the sturdy boy felt it, as he ought 114 Tales to, restlessly; not as the serene elms did, and the white lilac. The elms always seemed to him to belong to the faculty. As he sat in the shade of the particular elm that overhung the southeast corner of Professor Thornell’s garden, on the rustic seat (of iron, painted, not at all rusty) against the high stone wall, the arms of the tree swooped over him vigilantly, and gave him an uneasy sense as of one who would be requested to stay after that recitation if he forgot himself. Nature herself always seemed, in Bonn, to be appointed by the trustees. His companion on the painted rustic seat did not say “swooped.” She said “swept,”—the branches swept. She was the only daughter of Professor Thornell. The young man, it was easy to see at a glance, was of a sort known in college circles as the popular fellow. This may mean almost anything; it sometimes means the best of things, as perhaps in this instance. He had a happy, hearty face. His eye was as direct as a noon sunbeam, and at times as bright; at others, it withdrew, like the eyes of a much older man, into a subdued cloud, blue, or gray, or violet, or one knew not what. He had bright brown hair, curly, and beneath the boyish mustache the cut of a firm, rather full, but remarkably delicate mouth was agreeably visible. He had the complexion and hands of carefully reared but athletic boys. He did not look as if he had ever done a stroke of work in his life outside of a campus or a schoolroom. One smiled on glancing from his cheek, ruddy and fair as a girl’s, to his palms, gnarled with the knocks of baseball, and his iron wrists. He had a round, Greek head, well set upon his shoulders. Seen for the first time in a crowd, an experienced teacher would have said of him, “There goes a promise,—a well-born, well-balanced promise.” The girl beside him was a trifle older than he, by the shade of a year, perhaps. At their age each camel’s-hair stroke of the brush of time tells. This little circumstance added dignity to her carriage and appearance. She hardly needed it. To some...

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