buttoning up his faded gray jacket, the parole which was the testimony to his children of his fidelity and faith, he turned his face southward from Appomattox in April, 1865. Think of him as ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, enfeebled by want and wounds; having fought to exhaustion, he surrenders his gun, wrings the hands of his comrades in silence, and lifting his tear-stained and pallid face for the last time to the graves that dot the old Virginia hills, pulls his gray cap over his brow and begins the slow and painful journey.

What does he find - let me ask you, who went to your homes eager to find, in the welcome you had justly earned, full payment for four years' sacrifice-what does he find when, having followed the battle-stained cross against overwhelming odds, dreading death not half as much as surrender, he reaches the home he left so prosperous and beautiful?

He finds his house in ruins, his farms devastated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his money worthless; his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away; his people without law or legal status, his comrades slain, and the burdens of others heavy on his shoulders. Crushed by defeat, his very traditions are gone; without money, credit, employment, material, or training; and, besides all this, confronted with the gravest problem that ever met human intelligence - the establishing of a status for the vast body of his liberated slaves.

What does he do this hero in gray with a heart of gold? Does he sit down in sullenness and despair? Not for a day. Surely God, who had stripped him in his prosperity, inspired him in his adversity. As ruin was never so overwhelming, never was restoration swifter. The soldier stepped from the trenches, into the furrow; horses that had charged Federal guns marched before the plough, and fields that ran red with blood in April were green with the harvest of June.

Never was nobler duty confided to human hands than the uplifting and upbuilding of the prostrate and bleeding South,

misguided, perhaps, but beautiful in her suffering. In the record of her social, industrial, and political evolution, we await with confidence the verdict of the world.

GRANT SALUTES THE VETERANS

HORACE PORTER

[From an address at the banquet of the Army of the Tennessee at Chicago, October 8, 1891.]

Ir was on Decoration Day in the City of New York, the last one he ever saw on earth. That morning the members of the Grand Army of the Republic, the veterans in that vicinity, arose earlier than was their wont. They seemed to spend more time that morning in unfurling the old battle flags, in burnishing the medals of honor which decorated their breasts, for on that day they had determined to march by the house of their dying commander to give him a last marching salute. In the streets the columns were forming; inside the house on that bed, from which he was never to rise again, lay the stricken chief. The hand which had seized the surrendered swords of countless thousands could scarcely return the pressure of the friendly grasp. The voice which had cheered on to triumphant victory the legions of America's manhood could no longer call for the cooling draught which slaked the thirst of a fevered tongue; and prostrate on that bed of anguish lay the form which in the New World had ridden at the head of the conquering column, which in the Old World had been deemed worthy to stand with head covered and feet sandaled in the presence of princes, kings, and emperors. Now his ear caught the sound of martial music. . . . And then came the heavy, measured steps of moving columns, a step which can be acquired only by years of service in the field. He recognized it all now. It was the tread of his old veterans. With his little remaining strength he arose and dragged himself to the window. As he gazed upon those battle-flags dipping

to him in salute, those precious standards bullet-riddled, battlestained, but remnants of their former selves, with scarcely enough left of them on which to print the names of the battles they had seen, his eyes once more kindled with the flames that had lighted them at Shiloh, on the heights of Chattanooga, amid the glories of Appomattox; and as those war-scarred veterans looked with uncovered heads and upturned faces for the last time upon the pallid features of their old chief, cheeks which had been bronzed by Southern suns and begrimed with powder, were bathed in the tears of a manly grief. Soon they saw rising the hand which had so often pointed out to them the path of victory. He raised it slowly and painfully to his head in recognition of their salutations. The column had passed, the hand fell heavily by his side. It was his last military salute.

PART VIII

GALLANT YOUTH

Fame loves the gentleman and the true-hearted,
but her sweetheart is gallant youth.— SCHAFF.

NATHAN HALE

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

[This sketch of the martyr-spy was written by his grand-nephew. There is a statue of Nathan Hale in one of the parks in New York City.]

NATHAN HALE was born on the 6th of June, 1755, at Coventry, Connecticut. His early education was of that distinctly domestic type, under definite religious direction, which partook of the New England custom of those days. It looked forward to the best, and upward to the noblest, so that there was no service, for God or country, to which the boy, trained under its influence, might not aspire. . ..

Young Hale entered Yale College at fourteen, having, ultimately, the ministry in view. Just after the battle of Lexington, at a town-meeting, with the audacity of boyhood, he cried out, "Let us never lay down our arms till we have achieved independence!" Where had he learned that new word, not to be found in Shakespeare, or in Spenser, and, in Bacon, only as applied to the "Independents" of England? Is there on record any earlier demand for independence than this bold utterance of the boy, Nathan Hale, in April, 1775?

Not yet two years out of college, he secured release from the school he was teaching, enlisted in Webb's regiment, the

Seventh Connecticut,-by the 1st of September was promoted from lieutenant to captain, and on the 14th marched to Cambridge. He shared in the achievement at Dorchester, and his regiment was one of the five that first marched to New London and thence by water to New York. On the 29th of August, 1776, a sergeant and four of his men attempted to burn the frigate Phenix, and did cut out one of her tenders, securing four cannon.

The war goes on. Where was Hale, as the weeks go by? He was on dangerous service. Washington needed immediate information of the enemy's plans. At a meeting of officers, when his wishes were made known, one answered, "I am willing to be shot; but not hung." When dead silence ensued, Hale, the youngest captain present, still pale from recent sickness, spoke out: "I will undertake it. If my country demands a peculiar service, its claims are imperious." These are the last words we can report of him, until those near his death.

In the second week of September he made a successful attempt, taking with him his college diploma, to pass for a Connecticut school-master, and secured the information desired; but his boat failed to meet him. A British boat answered the signal. His notes, written in Latin, exposed him. He was taken to New York on that eventful 21st of September when five hundred of its buildings were burned, was summarily tried, and executed the next day. The brutal provost-marshal burned, before his face, the letters written to his friends, saying, as excuse, "The rebels shall not know they have a man who can die so bravely." A Bible was refused him, but he was permitted, in derision, "to address the people when he went to the gallows." One sentence makes his name immortal: "I only regret that I have but one life to give to my country."