s went down,--
How their dear lives were spent
In the weary hospital-tent,
In the cockpit's crowded hive,
----it seems
Ignoble to be alive!

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.

"Keeper of what? Keeper of the dead. Well, it is easier to keep the dead
than the living; and as for the gloom of the thing, the living among
whom I have been lately were not a hilarious set."

John Rodman sat in the doorway and looked out over his domain. The
little cottage behind him was empty of life save himself alone. In one
room the slender appointments provided by Government for the keeper, who
being still alive must sleep and eat, made the bareness doubly bare; in
the other the desk and the great ledgers, the ink and pens, the
register, the loud-ticking clock on the wall, and the flag folded on a
shelf, were all for the kept, whose names, in hastily written, blotted
rolls of manuscript, were waiting to be transcribed in the new red-bound
ledgers in the keeper's best handwriting day by day, while the clock was
to tell him the hour when the flag must rise over the mounds where
reposed the bodies of fourteen thousand United States soldiers--who had
languished where once stood the prison-pens, on the opposite slopes, now
fair and peaceful in the sunset; who had fallen by the way in long
marches to and fro under the burning sun; who had fought and died on the
many battle-fields that reddened the beautiful State, stretching from
the peaks of the marble mountains in the smoky west down to the
sea-islands of the ocean border. The last rim of the sun's red ball had
sunk below the horizon line, and the western sky glowed with deep
rose-color, which faded away above into pink, into the salmon-tint, into
shades of that far-away heavenly emerald which the brush of the earthly
artist can never reproduce, but which is found sometimes in the
iridescent heart of the opal. The small town, a mile distant, stood
turning its back on the cemetery; but the keeper could see the pleasant,
rambling old mansions, each with its rose-garden and neglected outlying
fields, the empty negro quarters falling into ruin, and everything just
as it stood when on that April morning the first gun was fired on
Sumter; apparently not a nail added, not a brushful of paint applied,
not a fallen brick replaced, or latch or lock repaired. The keeper had
noted these things as he strolled through the town, but not with
surprise; for he had seen the South in