h happened to be white, and left a perfect imprint
of itself; and the jerk of the horse's head and the outline of the
bullet are present to me still. The explosion of a particular caisson,
the shriek of a special shell, will ring in one's ears for life. A
captured lieutenant was no novelty, and yet this captured lieutenant
caught my eye and held it. A handsomer young fellow, a more
noble-looking, I never beheld among Federals or Confederates, as he
stood there, bare-headed, among his captors, erect and silent. His eyes
were full of fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, and his
hair seemed to tighten its curls in defiance. Doubtless I had seen as
fine specimens of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen without
looking, and this man was evidently what we called a gentleman.

[Note: "Deboshed" is a reminiscence of an essay of LOWELL'S on
Reconstruction, in which he makes light of Southern claims to
aristocracy.]

Southern men were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told
in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride,--foolish in
itself, foolish in that it did not have the heraldic backing that was
claimed for it; the utmost concession being that a number of "deboshed"
younger sons of decayed gentry had been shipped to Virginia in the early
settlement of that colony. But the very pride played its part in making
us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid
"deboshed," of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we
all held to the same standard, and showed, as was thought, undue
exclusiveness on this subject. But this prisoner was the embodiment of
the best type of Northern youth, with a spirit as high, as resolute, as
could be found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen; and though in theory
all enlightened Southerners recognized the high qualities of some of our
opponents, this one noble figure in "flesh and blood" was better
calculated to inspire respect for "those people," as we had learned to
call our adversaries, than many pages of "gray theory."

[Note: General LEE always referred to the enemy as "those people." JOHN
S. WISE, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1894. WISE is one ear-witness among
many, and I thought of General LEE, as well as of Dante, when I wrote in
my Introductory Essay to Pindar, xxxviii:

A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with a stroke.
In t