Besides the Bible and his mother, Ephraim taught his son one other
great thing; that was America. America was Samuel's country, the land
where his fathers had died. It was a land set apart from all others,
for the working out of a high and wonderful destiny. It was the land
of Liberty. For this whole armies of heroic men had poured out their
heart's blood; and their dream was embodied in institutions which were
almost as sacred as the Book itself. Samuel learned hymns which dealt
with these things, and he heard great speeches about them; every
Fourth of July that he could remember he had driven out to the
courthouse to hear one, and he was never in the least ashamed when the
tears came into his eyes.
He had seen tears even in the summer boarders' eyes; once or twice
when on a quiet evening it chanced that the old man unlocked the
secret chambers of his soul. For Ephraim Prescott had been through the
War. He had marched with the Seventeenth Pennsylvania from Bull Run to
Cold Harbor, where he had been three times wounded; and his memory was
a storehouse of mighty deeds and thrilling images. Heroic figures
strode through it; there were marches and weary sieges, prison and
sickness and despair; there were moments of horror and of glory,
visions of blood and anguish, of flame and cannon smoke; there were
battle flags, torn by shot and shell, and names of precious memory,
which stirred the deep places of the soul.
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