the battling South, known in history
as "the rebel yell". Men and women and children joined in it. It
began at the first sight of the regular column, swelled up the crowded
streets, rose to the thronged housetops, ran along them for squares like
a conflagration, and then came rolling back in volume only to rise and
swell again greater than before. Men wept; children shrilled; women
sobbed aloud. What was it! Only a thousand or two of old or aging men
riding or tramping along through the dust of the street, under some old
flags, dirty and ragged and stained. But they represented the spirit of
the South; they represented the spirit which when honor was in question
never counted the cost; the spirit that had stood up for the South
against overwhelming odds for four years, and until the South had
crumbled and perished under the forces of war; the spirit that is the
strongest guaranty to us to-day that the Union is and is to be; the
spirit that, glorious in victory, had displayed a fortitude yet greater
in defeat. They saw in every stain on those tattered standards the blood
of their noblest, bravest, and best; in every rent a proof of their
glorious courage and sacrifice. They saw in those gray and careworn
faces, in those old clothes interspersed now and then with a faded gray
uniform, the men who in the ardor of their youth had, for the South,
faced death undaunted on a hundred fields, and had never even thought it
great; men who had looked immortality in the eyes, yet had been thrown
down and trampled underfoot, and who were greater in their overthrow
than when glory poured her light upon their upturned faces. Not one of
them all but was self-sustaining, sustained by the South, or had ever
even for one moment thought in his direst extremity that he would have
what was, undone.

The crowd was immense; the people on the fashionable street up which the
procession passed were fortunate; they had the advantage of their yards
and porticos, and they threw them open to the public. Still the throng
on the sidewalks was tremendous, and just before the old veterans came
along the crush increased. As it resettled itself I became conscious
that a little old woman in a rusty black dress whom I had seen patiently
standing alone in the front line on the street corner for an hour had
lost her position, and had been pushed back against the railing, and had
an anxious, disappointed look on her face. She had a little, faded knot
of Confede