stitute. Stonewall Jackson had been for ten years a teacher
there. The turf of the parade I was crossing had perhaps felt no
footfall more often than his. Two or three hundred pupils, the flower
of Virginia youth, were assembled in battalion, and I witnessed from
a favourable point their almost perfect drill. As the sun was about to
set, they formed in a far-extending line, with each piece at present.
They were saluting the flag, which now began slowly to descend from,
its staff. Lo, it was the flag of the Union. The band played, I
thought, with unusual sweetness, the Star-Spangled Banner, and to
the music those picked youths of the South, sons and grandsons of the
upholders of the right to sever, did all possible honour, on the sod
which Stonewall Jackson trod, hard by the grave of Lee, to the symbol
of a country united, states now and hereafter in a brotherhood not to
be broken! It was a scene to evoke tears of deep emotion, for never
before or since has it come home to me so powerfully that the Union
had been preserved.

Closing as I do now my record of memories, I feel that the most
momentous of the crises through which it has been my lot to pass
is that attending the maintenance of the Federal bond in the United
States. Assemblies of veterans of the Confederacy and those who
address them scout the idea that they fought to preserve negro
bondage. A late historian of our Civil War, Professor Paxon, of
Wisconsin, holds it to be "reasonably certain" that in another
generation slavery would have disappeared of itself, a contention
surely open to dispute. Here I neither dispute nor approve, but
only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it
constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate
evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an
indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed
for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve!
Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did
not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle was that a State could
not be coerced,--and that therefore sovereignty lay in the scattered
constituents and not at the centre. The arbitrament of the sword was
sharp and swift, and happily for the world it went against them. I
well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched
and seamed with bewildering spots of colour. The effort was to portray
the posi