On the train from Albany my attention was attracted by a man in close conversation with the conductor. I was evidently the subject of discussion, for they would look carefully over the paper they held and then at me as if comparing me with something therein described. Had I been a hardened criminal they would probably not have taken the risk of thus warning me of the fact that I was under suspicion. As my appearance would seem to indicate that, if a law-breaker, I was a mere tyro in crime, they supposed they could safely take notes of me. I was absolutely sure that they were talking of me and trembled with a presentiment of coming evil. I tried to turn my face to the window but my eyes were fascinated. A thousand preposterous fears passed in review before my mind, though the real one never suggested itself. I endeavored to dispel them each in turn, arguing that the scrutiny of the men foreboded nothing, because I seemed an object of curiosity to everybody and, recalling my appearance, I do not wonder.

My dress was different from that of those around me, though I was unconscious of any defect in my apparel, being garmented in my very best, the traveling gown in which I had been married, and which had been bought and made under great difficulties and kept afterward with scrupulous care. So I was perfectly well satisfied with myself.

I wore a long, loose-fitting black silk mantilla with three ruffles at the bottom, while those around me were dressed in tight-fitting, short cloth jackets. My gray straw bonnet, sewed into poke shape by our fashionable village milliner, extended far over the face, its wreath of pink moss-rosebuds inside tangled in with my dark brown hair. It was trimmed on the outside with several clusters and bunches of hand-made grapes of a lighter shade of gray. My collar was about five inches wide and pinned in front with a cameo breastpin. The prevailing collar worn by the world around me was linen, very narrow, only an edge showing, and small jaunty hats, worn back on the head, were the style.

The conductor seemed to be arguing with the strange man as I caught his eye. Just then my baby sprang forward and snatched a newspaper that an old gentleman in front of me was reading, and shrieked when it was loosened from his grasp, the old gentleman looking daggers in answer to my apology. After this diversion I found that the two men were gone, for which I thanked Heaven.

I had just settled back, a little unnerved and weak, when from behind me came a touch on my shoulder and, turning around, I saw the strange man and the conductor. The former said, "I have a warrant for your arrest, Madam," and forthwith served it upon me.

There on the cars, all alone, miles away from home and friends, two dollars and ten cents all my little store, I was arrested for—stealing! Stealing my own child! I could not read the warrant as it trembled in my hands—I had never before seen or heard of one. Baby thought it was a compromise for the old gentleman's paper, and it was with difficulty rescued from his little clenched hands, after being torn in the struggle.

As soon as my confused wits grasped the meaning of this I said:

"This baby! This baby, sir? It is mine—mine—it is named after its father—it is mine and I can prove it by everybody in the world, and——"

"Well, well," said the conductor kindly, his voice trembling, "that's all he wants, lady. You will be detained, probably, only till the next train."

"But I must go on," I said, "for my husband is looking for me and I could not bear to stay away another minute longer than the time at which he expects me. Please, everybody, help me."

My fright had attracted attention, and some stared, some were too refined even to look toward me; others merely glanced over their glasses or looked up from their books and went on reading. Some kept their faces carefully turned toward the landscape; a few, just as heartless and more vulgar, gathered around me in open-mouthed curiosity.

One woman's good heart, thank God, redeemed them all. She came forward, her tender blue eyes moist with sympathy, her black crÊpe veil thrown back from her lovely face and her waving hair with the silver threads all too soon among the gold, and said in a voice so sweet that it might have come from the hearts of the lilies-of-the-valley that she wore bunched at her swan-white throat:

"Come, I will stop off with you if it must be. Let me see the paper."

Simultaneously with her, the gentleman of the home-spun shawl came from I don't know where and asked, too, to see the paper and both got off the train with me.

I was so weak that I could not hold my baby, for all at once there came over me the sense of my utter helplessness to prove that my child was my own. There was no one to whom I could telegraph without revealing my identity and the purpose of my journey. A telegram to my friends at home would alarm them and might betray me. A message to my Soldier would jeopardize his safety, for he would surely come to me at once.

"Look, look!" I said to the magistrate and officers when they read aloud the suspicions and accusation of the philanthropic ladies who were with me on board the Albany steamer and who, in their zeal to secure a right and correct a wrong, ignorant of the cause of my child's discomfort and unhappiness with me and the reasons for my rather suspicious reticence, had caused my arrest.

Thus do the pure and holy ever keep guard over the sins of the world and throw the cable-cord of justice around the unregenerate to drag them perforce into the path of rectitude. May they reap the reward to which their virtues entitle them.

"Look at his eyes and look at mine," I exclaimed, holding his little face up against my own. "Can't you all see that it is my child?"

"That may be, but give us the name of some one to whom we may telegraph—some tangible proof. If he is your own there must be some one who knows you and can testify in your behalf."

"No, no," I said, "there is no one. I have nobody to help me, and if God does not show you all some way and your own hearts do not convince you I don't know what I shall do."

My poor little, half-starved, in-litigation baby refused to be comforted. The kind gentleman with the shawl could amuse him no longer. He had dashed from him the keys and pushed the watch from his ear and demanded impatiently the right of sustenance. The dear, good woman beside me, with the smile of the redeemed and a look of relief lighting up her face, touched mine, whispering in my ear while I held the baby's hands to prevent him in his impatience from tearing apart my mantle and untying my bonnet-strings:

"Do you nurse your baby?"

"Yes," I replied, "and he is so hungry, poor little thing."

She stood up, leaning on her cane, for she was slightly lame, and said in a voice clear and sweet:

"Gentlemen, I have a witness"—my heart almost stood still—"here, in the child who cannot speak. It is not always a proof of motherhood, but with the circumstantial evidence and the youth of this mother, this beyond peradventure is proof convincing. The child is still nourished from her own body," and she opened my mantle.

I, who had never nursed my baby in the presence of even my most intimate friends, bared my bosom before all those strange men and women and nursed him as proof that I was his mother, while tears of gratitude to the sweet friend and to God flowed down my cheeks and dropped onto baby's face as he wonderingly looked up, trying to gather up the tears with his little dimpled fingers and thankfully enjoying the proof. The men turned aside and tears flowed down more than one rugged face. The kind stranger with the shawl lifted his eyes heavenward as if in thanksgiving, and then turned them earthward and breathed a bitter curse, deep and heartfelt. Perhaps the recording angel jotted down the curse on the credit side of the ledger with as great alacrity as he registered there the prayer of thanks.

I trust that the philanthropic ladies, when the facts were placed before them, were as surely convinced as all these people were that I had not stolen my child. I hope they were pleased by this indication that some degree of innocence existed in the world, outside of their own virtuous hearts, but—I don't know.

"Take thy fledgling, poor mother dove, under thy trembling wings, back to its nest and the father bird's care. I shall go a few miles further where I stop to see my baby," said my new friend. "This little boy who brought me back to life is older than yours. He is the child of my only son, whose young life ebbed out on the battlefield of Gettysburg, and whose sweet spirit has joined that of his noble father, my husband, which in his first battle was freed. This baby blesses our lives—the young mother's and the old mother's."

The cars were crowded with soldiers returning home, disbanded soldiers, soldiers on furlough, and released prisoners, with pale, cadaverous, unshaven faces and long, unkempt hair. One from Andersonville, more ragged and emaciated than the others, was selling his pictures and describing the horrors of his prison life and, as he told of his sufferings and torture amid groans of sympathy, maledictions and curses were hurled against my people. Once his long, bony arm and hand seemed to be stretched menacingly toward me as he drew the picture of "the martyred Lincoln, whose blood cries out for vengeance. We follow his hearse; let us swear hatred to these people against whom he warred and, as the cannon beats the hours with solemn progression, renew with each note unappeasable hatred."

I crouched back in my seat, almost holding my breath as I pressed my baby to my wildly throbbing heart. The train stopped and the sweet new friend touched my brow with her lips, leaving the kiss and a prayer, put the lilies into my hand and was gone. The cars moved on and there was a great void in my heart as I thought of my God-given friend, so lately found, so swiftly lost.

All this was half a century ago, but one of the lilies yet lies in my prayer-book, glorifying with the halo of a precious memory the page on which it rests.

A man, not a soldier I think, for brave soldiers are magnanimous and generous always, stood up in a seat opposite mine and said:

"When I think of the horrors of Libby and Andersonville and look at these poor sufferers I not only want to invoke the vengeance of a just God but I want to take a hand in it myself. Quarter should be shown to none; every man, woman and child of this accursed Southern race should be bound to their own slaves for a specified length of time, that they, too, might know the curse of serfdom. Their lands should be confiscated and given to those whom they have so long and so cruelly wronged."

As he in detail related the story of the scanty allowance of the prisoners, the filth and darkness of their cells, I longed to stand and plead for my people, and tell how they, too, were without soap, food or clothes; that we had no medicines, even, except what were smuggled through the lines, and that our own poor soldiers were barefooted and starving, and that all the suffering of prisoners on both sides could have been avoided by carrying out the terms proposed by the Confederate Government. If I had only dared to raise the veil and reveal the truth perhaps sympathy might have tempered their bitterness, the flame of divine kinship smouldering in their veins, hidden as in a tomb, might have miraged over the gulf of wrongs a bridge of holier feelings.

Yet the memory of the woman whose son had been killed on the field of Gettysburg and whose lily, now browned and withered with the years, I cherish with such tender care, softened the words that were like blows to my ear and heart. Thus the power of one pure heart radiating its love upon the world as an odorous flower diffuses fragrance on the surrounding atmosphere, uplifts the sorrowing spirit and strengthens it to withstand the rude assaults of a vindictive world.