its first estate, when, fresh,
strong, and fired with enthusiasm, he, too, had marched away from his
village home with the colors flying above and the girls waving their
handkerchiefs behind, as the regiment, a thousand strong, filed down the
dusty road. That regiment, a weak, scarred two hundred, came back a year
later with lagging step and colors tattered and scorched, and the girls
could not wave their handkerchiefs, wet and sodden with tears. But the
keeper, his wound healed, had gone again; and he had seen with his New
England eyes the magnificence and the carelessness of the South, her
splendor and negligence, her wealth and thriftlessness, as through
Virginia and the fair Carolinas, across Georgia and into sunny Florida,
he had marched month by month, first a lieutenant, then captain, and
finally major and colonel, as death mowed down those above him, and he
and his good conduct were left. Everywhere magnificence went hand in
hand with neglect, and he had said so as chance now and then threw a
conversation in his path.

"We have no such shiftless ways," he would remark, after he had
furtively supplied a prisoner with hard-tack and coffee.

"And no such grand ones either," Johnny Reb would reply, if he was a man
of spirit; and generally he was.

The Yankee, forced to acknowledge the truth of this statement, qualified
it by observing that he would rather have more thrift with a little less
grandeur; whereupon the other answered that _he_ would not; and there
the conversation rested. So now ex-Colonel Rodman, keeper of the
national cemetery, viewed the little town in its second estate with
philosophic eyes. "It is part of a great problem now working itself out;
I am not here to tend the living, but the dead," he said.

Whereupon, as he walked among the long mounds, a voice seemed to rise
from the still ranks below: "While ye have time, do good to men," it
said. "Behold, we are beyond your care." But the keeper did not heed.

This still evening in early February he looked out over the level waste.
The little town stood in the lowlands; there were no hills from whence
cometh help--calm heights that lift the soul above earth and its cares;
no river to lead the aspirations of the children outward toward the
great sea. Everything was monotonous, and the only spirit that rose
above the waste was a bitterness for the gained and sorrow for the lost
cause. The keeper was the only man whose presence personated the former