soldier of his class was at first oppressed. Ever since
Grant had refused in the Wilderness--a year before--to retire beyond the
river after receiving Lee's tremendous blows, Guilford Duncan and all
Confederates of like intelligence had foreseen the end and had
recognized its coming as inevitable. Nevertheless, when it came in fact,
when the army of Northern Virginia surrendered, and when the Confederacy
ceased to be, the event was scarcely less shocking and depressing to
their minds than if it had been an unforeseen and unexpected one.

The melancholy that instantly took possession of such minds amounted to
scarcely less than insanity, and for a prolonged period it paralyzed
energy and made worse the ruin that war had wrought in the South.

Fortunately Guilford Duncan, thrown at once and absolutely upon his own
resources, thus quickly escaped from the overshadowing cloud.

And yet his case seemed worse than that of most of his comrades. They,
at least, had homes of some sort to go to; he had none. There was for
them, debt burdened as their plantations were, at least a hope that some
way out might ultimately be found. For him there was no inch of ground
upon which he might rest even a hope.

Born of an old family he had been bred and educated as one to whom
abundance was to come by inheritance, a man destined from birth to
become in time the master of a great patrimonial estate.

But that estate was honeycombed with hereditary debt, the result of
generations of lavish living, wasteful methods of agriculture, and
over-generous hospitality. About the time when war came there came also
a crisis in the affairs of Guilford Duncan's father. Long before the war
ended the elder man had surrendered everything he had in the world to
his creditors. He had then enlisted in the army, though he was more than
sixty years old. He had been killed in the trenches before Petersburg,
leaving his only son, Guilford, not only without a patrimony and without
a home, but also without any family connection closer than some distant
half-theoretical cousin-ships. The young man's mother had gently passed
from earth so long ago that he only dimly remembered the sweet nobility
of her character, and he had never had either brother or sister.

He was thus absolutely alone in the world, and he was penniless, too, as
he rode down the mountain steeps. But the impulse of work had come to
him, and he joyfully welcomed it as something vastly better and