n army followed as fast as it could march, and the cavalry rode
on until it was ahead of the Confederates. Then General Lee saw that he
was surrounded by an army far stronger than his own. He could fight no
longer. His men were nearly starved. To fight would be to have them all
killed. So on the 9th of April he offered his sword to General Grant,
and the long and bloody war was at an end.

No one was gladder of this than President Lincoln, who had done so much
to bring it about. Poor man! five days afterwards he was shot in a
theatre at Washington by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. This was done
out of revenge for the defeat of the South. But the people of the South
did not approve of this act of murder, and in Abraham Lincoln they lost
one whom they would have found a good friend.

Booth was followed and killed, but his death could not bring back to
life the murdered President, whom the people loved so warmly that they
mourned for him as if he had been, like Washington, the Father of his
Country. It was a terrible crime, and it turned the joy which the people
felt, at the end of the war, into the deepest sorrow and grief.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WASTE OF WAR AND THE WEALTH OF PEACE

LET us suppose that the history of the whole world is spread out before
us like a picture, and that we are looking down on it. What will we see?
Well, we will see places where a terrible storm seems to have swept over
the picture, and left only darkness and ruin in its track. And we will
see other places where the sun seems to have poured down its bright
beams, and all is clear and bright and beautiful. The dark places are
those of war; the bright places are those of peace. All through history
there have been times when men have gone out to kill and burn and do all
the harm they could; and there have been other times when they stayed at
home to work, and build up what war had cast down, and bring plenty and
happiness to the nations.

In the picture of our own history we see such dark and bright places.
And the darkest of them all is the terrible Civil War, the story of
which you have just read. For in this war our people fought against and
killed one another, and all the harm was done at home, instead of in
foreign lands. The war was a dreadful one. Hundreds of thousands of our
people were killed or wounded, and the ground in hundreds of places was
red with blood. Houses, barns and factories were burned, railroads were
torn up, s