A woman with a
mission was Janet, and one who went at it unflinchingly. She had loved
her brother always, yet disapproved his marriage to so young and
unformed a woman as was his wife. Later, she had deprecated from the
start the soldier spirit, fierce in his Highland blood, that tore him
from the teachings of their gentle mother and her beloved meenister,
took him from his fair young wife when most she needed him and sent
him straightway into the ranks of the one Highland regiment in the
Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. His gallant colonel fell
at First Bull Run, and Sergeant Wren fought over his body to the
fervent admiration of the Southerners who captured both. The first War
Secretary, mourning a beloved brother and grateful to his defender,
commissioned the latter in the regulars at once and, on his return
from Libby, Wren joined the army as a first lieutenant. With genuine
Scottish thrift, his slender pay had been hoarded for him, and his now
motherless little one, by that devoted sister, and when, a captain at
the close of the war, he came to clasp his daughter to his heart, he
found himself possessed of a few hundreds more than fell to the lot of
most of his associates. It was then that Janet, motherless herself,
had stepped into the management of her brother's army home, and sought
to dominate in that as she had in everything else from early girlhood.
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