ic broke out, and devoted himself
to the care of the victims. Having been accused of refusing to bury a
Federal he was escorted by a file of soldiers into the presence of
General Butler, who accosted him with great sternness:

"I am told that you refused to bury a dead soldier because he was a
Yankee."

"Why," answered Father Ryan in surprise, facing the hated general
without a tremor, "I was never asked to bury him and never refused.
The fact is, General, it would give me great pleasure to bury the
whole lot of you."

Butler lay back in his arm-chair and roared with laughter. "You've got
ahead of me, Father," he said. "You may go. Good morning, Father."

One of the incidents of which Father Ryan told me occurred when
smallpox was raging in a State prison. The official chaplain had fled
and no one could be found to take his place. One day a prisoner asked
for a minister to pray for him, and Father Ryan, whose parish was not
far away, was sent for. He was in the prison before the messenger had
returned and, having been exposed to contagion, was not permitted to
leave. He remained in the prison ministering to the sick until the
epidemic had passed.

Immediately after the war he was stationed in New Orleans where he
edited _The Star_, a Roman Catholic weekly. Afterward he was in
Nashville, Clarksville, and Knoxville, and from there went to Augusta,
Georgia, where he founded and edited the "_Banner of the South_,"
which was permanently furled after having waved for a few years.

Unlike most Southern poets, Father Ryan did not take his themes from
Nature, and when her phenomena enters into his verse it is usually as
a setting for the expression of some ethic or emotional sentiment. He
has been called "the historian of a human soul," and it was in the
crises of life that his feeling claimed poetical expression. When he
heard of Lee's surrender "The Conquered Banner" drooped its mournful
folds over the heart-broken South. In his memorial address at
Fredericksburg when the Southern soldiers were buried, he first read
"March of the Deathless Dead," closing with the lines:

And the dead thus meet the dead,
While the living' o'er them weep;
And the men by Lee and Stonewall led,
And the hearts that once together bled,
Together still shall sleep.

June 28, 1883, I was in Lexington and saw the unveiling of Valentine's
recumbent statue of General Lee in Washington and Lee University. At
the conclusi