of a watch. He gave his
time-piece to his wife, who put it away with her other relics and
treasures.

How it was with other communities it is not for this chronicler to say,
but the collapse of the Confederacy, coming when it did, was an event
that Shady Dale least expected. The last trump will cause no greater
surprise and consternation the world over, than the news of Lee's
surrender caused in that region. The public mind had not been prepared
for such an event, especially in those districts remote from the centres
of information. Almost every piece of news printed in the journals of
the day was coloured with the prospect of ultimate victory: and when the
curtain suddenly came down and the lights went out, no language can
describe the grief, the despair, and the feeling of abject humiliation
that fell upon the white population in the small towns and village
communities. How it was in the cities has not been recorded, but it is
to be presumed that then, as now, the demands and necessities of trade
and business were powerful enough to overcome and destroy the worst
effects of a calamity that attacked the sentiments and emotions.

It has been demonstrated recently on some very wide fields of action
that the atmosphere of commercialism is unfavourable to the growth of
sentiments of an ideal character. That is why wise men who believe in
the finer issues of life are inclined to be suspicious of what is
loosely called civilisation and progress, and doubtful of the theories
of those who clothe themselves in the mantle of science.

Whatever the feeling in the cities may have been when news of the
surrender came, it caused the most poignant grief and despair in the
country places: and there, as elsewhere in this world, whenever
suffering is to be borne, the most of the burden falls on the shoulders
of the women. It is at once the strength and weakness of the sex that
woman suffers more than man and is more capable of enduring the pangs of
suffering.

As for the men they soon recovered from the shock. They were startled
and stunned, but when they opened their eyes to the situation they found
themselves confronted by conditions that had no precedent or parallel in
the history of the world. It is small fault if their minds failed at
first to grasp the significance and the import of these conditions, so
new were they and so amazing.

A few years later, Gabriel Tolliver, who, when the surrender came, was a
lad just beyond se