The Duke of Stockbridge by Edward Bellamy — Read

Peleg's information, although of a hearsay character, was correct. / Perez Hamlin was coming home. The day following the conversation in the / barroom of Stockbridge tavern, which I have briefly sketched in the / last chapter, about an hour after noon, a horseman might have been seen / approaching the village of Great Barrington, on the road from Sheffield. / He wore the buff and blue uniform of a captain in the late Continental / army, and strapped to the saddle was a steel hilted sword which had / apparently experienced a good many hard knocks. The lack of any other / baggage to speak of, as well as the frayed and stained condition of his / uniform, indicated that however rich the rider might be in glory, he was / tolerably destitute of more palpable forms of wealth.

Poverty, in fact, had been the chief reason that had prevented Captain / Hamlin from returning home before. The close of the war had found him / serving under General Greene in South Carolina, and on the disbandment / of the troops he had been left without means of support. Since then / he had been slowly working his way homewards, stopping a few months / wherever employment or hospitality offered. What with the lack and / insecurity of mails, and his frequent movements, he had not heard from / home for two or three years, though he had written. But in those days, / when the constant exchange of bulletins of health and business between / friends, which burdens modern mail bags, was out of the question, the / fact perhaps developed a more robust quality of faith in the well-being / of the absent than is known in these timid and anxious days. Certain it / is that as the soldier rides along, the smiles that from time to time / chase each other across his bronzed face, indicate that gay and tender / anticipations of the meeting now only a few hours away, leave no room in / his mind for gloomy conjectures of possible disaster. It is nine years / since he parted with his father and mother; and his brother Reub he has / not seen since the morning in 1778, when Perez, accepting a commission, / had gone south with General Greene, and Reub had left for home with / Abner and Fennell, and a lot of others whose time had expired. He smiles / now as he thinks how he never really knew what it was to enjoy the / fighting until he got the lad off home, so that he had not to worry / about his being hit every time there was any shooting going on. Coming / into Great Barrington, he asked the first man he met where the tavern / was.