of their caps Dick and the others turned and strode down the path.
Laura and Belle gazed after them until the young men had disappeared
into the encampment.

But you may be sure the girls were over on the parade ground by
the time that the good old gray battalion had turned out and marched
over, forming in battalion front.

It was a beautiful sight. Mrs. Bentley wasn't martial, but as
she looked on at that straight, inflexible wall of gray and steel,
as the band played the colors up to the right of line, the good
matron was thinking to herself:

"What a pity that the country hasn't a thousand such battalions
of the flower of young American manhood! Then what fear could
we know in time of war?"

The girls looked on almost breathlessly, starting at the boom
of the sunset gun, then thrilling with a new realization of what
their country meant when the band crashed out in the exultant
strains of the "Star Spangled Banner" and the Stars and Stripes
fluttered down at West Point, to rise on another day of the nation's
life.

It was over, and the visitors took the stage to the railway station.

What a fearfully dull evening it seemed in camp! Dick had never
known the time to hang so heavily. He would almost have welcomed
guard duty.