the long blue files
wound into position behind the earth barriers which hid them from the
enemy, coiled and ready to strike when the towering redoubt on the
Jackson road should rise heavenwards. By common consent the rifle
crack of day and night was hushed, and even the Parrotts were silent.
Stillness closed around the white house of Shirley once more, but not
the stillness it had known in its peaceful homestead days. This was
the stillness of the death prayer. Eyes staring at the big redoubt were
dimmed. At last, to those near, a little wisp of blue smoke crept out.

Then the earth opened with a quake. The sun was darkened, and a hot
blast fanned the upturned faces. In the sky, through the film of
shattered clay, little black dots scurried, poised, and fell again as
arms and legs and head less trunks and shapeless bits of wood and iron.
Scarcely had the dust settled when the sun caught the light of fifty
thousand bayonets, and a hundred shells were shrieking across the
crater's edge. Earth to earth, alas, and dust to dust! Men who ran
across that rim of a summer's after-noon died in torture under tier upon
tier of their comrades,--and so the hole was filled.

An upright cannon marks the spot where a scrawny oak once stood on
a scarred and baked hillside, outside of the Confederate lines at
Vicksburg. Under the scanty shade of that tree, on the eve of the
Nation's birthday, stood two men who typified the future and the past.
As at Donelson, a trick of Fortune's had delivered one comrade of old
into the hands of another. Now she chose to kiss the one upon whom she
had heaped obscurity and poverty and contumely. He had ceased to think
or care about Fortune. And hence, being born a woman, she favored him.

The two armies watched and were still. They noted the friendly greeting
of old comrades, and after that they saw the self-contained Northerner
biting his cigar, as one to whom the pleasantries of life were past and
gone. The South saw her General turn on his heel. The bitterness of his
life was come. Both sides honored him for the fight he had made. But war
does not reward a man according to his deserts.

The next day--the day our sundered nation was born Vicksburg
surrendered: the obstinate man with the mighty force had conquered. See
the gray regiments marching silently in the tropic heat into the folds
of that blue army whose grip has choked them at last. Silently, too, the
blue coats stand, pity and admiration on