lonely hills of his life’s journey, his wife’s people, seemed sorrowful, lonely, lost, and strange to him. Now he remembered all places, things, and people in his land of youth as if he had known them instantly and for ever!
Oh, what a land, a life, a time was that—that world of youth and no return. What colours of green-gold, magic, rich plantations, and shining cities were in it! For now when this dying man thought about this vanished life that tragic quality of sorrow and loneliness had vanished instantly. All that he had read in books about old wars seemed far and lost and in another time, but when he thought about these things that he had known as a boy, he saw them instantly, knew them, breathed them, heard them, felt them, was there beside them, living them with his own life. He remembered now his wife’s people!—tramping in along the Carlisle Pike on that hot first morning in July, as they marched in towards Gettysburg. He had been standing there with his next older brother Gil, beside the dusty road, as they came by.
And he could see them now, not as shadowy, lost, phantasmal figures of dark time, the way they were in books; he saw them, heard them, knew them again as they had been in their shapeless rags of uniforms, their bare feet wound in rags, their lank disordered hair, sometimes topped by stove-pipe hats which they had looted out of stores.
“God!” the old man thought, wetting his great thumb briefly, grinning thinly, as he shook his head, “What a scarecrow crew that was! In all my days I never saw the like of it! A bum-looking lot, if ever there was one!—And the bravest of the brave, the finest troops that ever lived!”—his mind swung upward to its tide of rhetoric—“Veterans all of them, who had been through the bloodiest battles of the war, they did not know the meaning of the word’fear,’and they would have gone into the valley of death, the jaws of hell, at a word from their Commander!” His mind was alive again, in full swing now, the old voice rose and muttered on the tides of rhetoric, the great hand gestured, the cold-grey, restless eyes glared feverishly about—and all of it began to live for him again.
He remembered how he and Gil had been standing there beside the road, two barefoot farmer boys, aged thirteen and fifteen, and he remembered how the rebels would halt upon their march, and shout jesting remarks at the two boys standing at the road. One shouted out to Gil:
“Hi, there, Yank! You’d better hide! Jeb Stuart’s on the way an’he’s been lookin’fer you!”
