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Updated: June 21, 2025
Watts McHurdie, a bride of five years and obviously proud of it, hurried by, and Mrs.
Dolan went on cutting curly-cues from the leather, and McHurdie kept on sewing at his bench. "It is a queer world a queer world; and that Johnnie Barclay is a queer duck. Bringing Lige Bemis clear down here to help old Mart out of a little trouble there ain't a dollar in; and then turning around and feeding the American people a mountain of mud.
But Watts McHurdie came home with a letter from Lincoln about his song, and he was the greatest man of all of them. It is odd that Sycamore Ridge grew during the war. Where the people came from, no one could say yet they came, and young Barclay remembered even during the war of playing in the foundations and running over the rafters of new houses.
Mrs. McHurdie insisted that Watts should whip Dolan, and it is possible that at home that night Watts did smite his breast and shake his head fiercely, for in the morning the neighbours saw Mrs.
"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?" Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the Times and read awhile; and the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into a silent game.
"In the flowers, Jane," she said, "you will find something from Watts." Mrs. McHurdie smiled. "You know he sat up till 'way after midnight last night, playing his accordion. Oh, it's been years since he has touched it. And this morning when I got up, I found him sitting by the kitchen table, writing. It's a poem for you." Mrs.
Watts McHurdie in the lead, Watts in his best brown suit, and Mrs. Watts in lavender to sustain her gray hair; General Ward, in his straight black frock coat and white tie, followed with Mrs.
That day Bob Hendricks walked one end of the station platform alone. The east-bound train was half an hour late, and while the veterans were teasing Watts and the women railing at Mrs. McHurdie, Hendricks discovered that it was one hundred and seventy-eight steps from one end of the walk to the other, and that to go entirely around the building made the distance fifty-four steps more.
When he read it, John Barclay, grown to a man of fifty-three, sitting at a great mahogany table, with a tablet of white paper on a green blotting pad before him, and a gorgeous rose rising from a tall graceful green vase on the shining table, looked out over a brown wilderness of roofs and chimneys across a broad river into the hills that were green afar off, and there, rising out of yesterday, he saw, not the bent little old man in the harness shop with steel-rimmed spectacles and greasy cap, whom you may see to-day; but instead, the boy in John Barclay's soul looked through his eyes, and he saw another Watts McHurdie, a dapper little fellow under a wide slouch hat, with a rolling Byronic collar, and fancy yellow waistcoat of the period, in exceedingly tight trousers.
For those first nineteen years passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen years seem the longest and the best.
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