“I’m used to it,” Starbuck said. “I have a mother too.” Though Starbuck’s mother was nothing like the soft-spoken and thin Miriam Faulconer. Jane Abigail MacPhail Starbuck was a tall, fleshy, loud-spoken woman who was large in everything except the generosity of her spirit.

“Mother’s often in pain.” Adam still wanted to make excuses for his mother. “She suffers from something called neuralgia.”

“So Anna told me.”

Adam walked in silence, looking down at the ground, and at last shook his head. “Why do women have to be so difficult?” He asked it so wanly that Starbuck could not help bursting into laughter.

Adam’s gloom did not last long for he was being reunited with old friends from all across the county, and he was soon leading a troop of young people in the various amusements that had been laid out in Washington Faulconer’s park. There were archery butts with straw men targets dressed in striped clothes and top hats, supposedly representing Yankees, and any man who signed up as a recruit could fire a Model 1841 rifle at one of the Yankee dummies. If such a recruit put a bullet clean through one of the targets pinned to a straw man’s chest he received a silver dollar. There were water-filled horse troughs where the children could duck for apples, a steeplechase for officers and challengers, tugs-of-war between the ten infantry companies and a ganderpull.

“Ganderpull?” Starbuck asked.

“You don’t have ganderpulls in Boston?” Adam asked.

“No, we have civilization instead. We have things called libraries and churches, schools and colleges…”

Adam hit his friend, then skipped out of retaliatory range. “You’ll enjoy a ganderpull. You hang up a goose, grease its neck with butter, and the first person who manages to pull the bird’s head off gets to take the body home for supper.”

“A live goose?” Starbuck was horrified.

“It would be too easy if it were dead!” Adam said. “Of course it’s alive!”

But before any of these diversions could be tasted the two friends had to go to the summerhouse where a pair of photographers had set up their chairs, tripods, frames and processing wagons. The two men, specially brought out from Richmond at Washington Faulconer’s expense, were charged with taking a picture of any man in the Legion who wanted his portrait made. The pictures, printed within ornate borders, would make keepsakes for the families left behind and mementoes for the men themselves in the long years ahead. The officers could have their portraits printed as cartes de visite, a fashionable conceit that appealed hugely to Washington Faulconer, who was first into the photographer’s chair. Adam was next.