k. I wonder what he was talking about? He is about to
start a woman's hospital for poor women. Cousin Fanny would have been
glad of that; she was always proud of Frank. She would as likely as not
have quoted that verse from Tennyson's song about the echoes. She sleeps
now under the myrtle at Scroggs's. I have often thought of what that
doctor said about her: that she would have been a very remarkable woman,
if she had not been an old maid--I mean, a spinster.

THE BURIAL OF THE GUNS

Lee surrendered the remnant of his army at Appomattox, April 9, 1865,
and yet a couple of days later the old Colonel's battery lay intrenched
right in the mountain-pass where it had halted three days before. Two
weeks previously it had been detailed with a light division sent to meet
and repel a force which it was understood was coming in by way of
the southwest valley to strike Lee in the rear of his long line from
Richmond to Petersburg. It had done its work. The mountain-pass had
been seized and held, and the Federal force had not gotten by that
road within the blue rampart which guarded on that side the heart of
Virginia. This pass, which was the key to the main line of passage over
the mountains, had been assigned by the commander of the division to
the old Colonel and his old battery, and they had held it. The position
taken by the battery had been chosen with a soldier's eye. A better
place could not have been selected to hold the pass. It was its highest
point, just where the road crawled over the shoulder of the mountain
along the limestone cliff, a hundred feet sheer above the deep river,
where its waters had cut their way in ages past, and now lay deep and
silent, as if resting after their arduous toil before they began to boil
over the great bowlders which filled the bed a hundred or more yards
below.

The little plateau at the top guarded the descending road on either side
for nearly a mile, and the mountain on the other side of the river was
the centre of a clump of rocky, heavily timbered spurs, so inaccessible
that no feet but those of wild animals or of the hardiest hunter had
ever climbed it. On the side of the river on which the road lay,
the only path out over the mountain except the road itself was a
charcoal-burner's track, dwindling at times to a footway known only to
the mountain-folk, which a picket at the top could hold against an army.
The position, well defended, was impregnable, and it was well defended.