But they have given their young lives, their
futures--their bodies, to be broken--' And then standing right in the
middle of the Toy Shop that mother prayed for her sons, and for the
sons of other women, and for the husbands and lovers, and that the
women might be brave.
"Oh, it was wonderful--as she stood there like a white-veiled
prophetess, praying.
"Yet a year ago she would have died rather than pray in public. She is
a conservative, aristocratic woman, the kind that doesn't wear rings or
try to be picturesque--and she has always kept her feelings to herself,
and said her prayers to herself--or in church, but never in all her
life has she been so fine as she was the other day praying in the Toy
Shop.
"Yet in a way I am sorry for myself. Not for me as I am to-day, but
for the Jean of Yesterday, who thought that patriotism was remembering
Bunker Hill!
"Of course in a way it is that--for Bunker Hill and Lexington and
Valley Forge are a part of us because our grandfathers were there, and
what they felt and did is a part of our feeling and doing.
"I have always thought of those old days as a sort of picture--the
embattled farmers in their shirt-sleeves and with their hair blowing,
and the Midnight Ride, and the lantern in the old North Church--and the
Spirit of '76.
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