desires not light. I would tell him that the great, loyal South loves him to-day as in the old days when he sacrificed on her altars a career in the army of the nation; when the thunder of his guns was heard around the world and the earth shook beneath the tread of his soldiers.

And as he journeys down to the Valley of Silence, the true sentiment of the generous South that he loves so well is voiced by Hon. John Temple Graves, in the Atlanta, Georgia, News:

"As there walks 'thoughtful on the silent, solemn shore of that vast ocean he must sail so soon,' one of the last of the great figures that moved colossal upon the tragic stage of the Civil War,-Longstreet, the grim and tenacious, the bulldog of war whose grip never relaxed, whose guns never ceased to thunder,— as the eye grows dim that blazed like lightning over so many stormy fields, let the noble woman who bears his name read to her heroic soldier the message that the South of the present, the not ignoble offspring of the past, compasses the couch of Longstreet with love, and covers his fading years with unfading admiration and unforgetting tenderness."

WASHINGTON, D. C., December, 1903.

LONGSTREET THE MAN

HIS BOYHOOD DAYS

THE original plan of this little work was to publish only the short story of Gettysburg which was written while General Longstreet lived. My friends have insisted that the generous public, although it has received the prospectus of the work with such warm appreciation, will be disappointed if I discuss only the one event of his most eventful life. And so have been added the paper on the Mexican War and chapters on his famous campaigns of the Civil War.

They have insisted further that I must speak of Longstreet the man. I have replied that I could not. My heart is sore. I cannot forget that he poured out his heroic blood in defence of the Southern people, and when there was not a flag left for him to fight for many of them turned against him and persecuted him with a bitterness that saddened his last years. They undertook to rob him of the glories of his many peerless campaigns; to convict him of treason to his cause on the field of battle. And when he lay dead, forty years after his world-famous victories, perhaps from an opening of the old wound received at the Wilderness, a Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy of the State beneath whose sod rests his valiant dust, refused to send flowers to his grave, because, they said, he disobeyed orders at Gettysburg. And a Southern Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans refused, for the same

alleged reason, to send a message of sympathy to his family. If I should now undertake to write about him I might speak of such things as these with bitterness; and I must not so speak, because I am a Southern woman, and the Southern people—my people-must forever be to me as they were to him, " dear as the ruddy drops about his heart."

I must not write about him until I can write bravely, sweetly, cheerfully, and in this hour it is, perhaps, more than my human nature can do. And I cannot take the public into my confidence about the man I loved. The subject is too sacred. But my friends demand at least one page on the man as I knew him, that the South at last-the dear South that I love with all my heart-may know him and love him as I did.

And so I undertake to string together disjointedly a few incidents of a life that was lived upon high levels, brave and blameless, and that the days give back to me a glorified memory, coupled with a great thankfulness that I had a small part in it.

From my childhood he had been the fine embodiment of my ideals of chivalry and courage. The sorrows of his later years aroused all the tender pity of my heart. His wounds and sufferings enveloped him with poetic interest. He was fighting the battles of my country before I was born. The blood of my ancestors had dyed the brilliant fields whereon he led. He was ever the hero of my young dreams; and throughout a long and checkered career always to me a figure of matchless splendor and gallantry.

His life was set to serious work. His father died before he was old enough to understand the meaning of a father's care. He had but little schooling before he went to West Point as cadet of the Military Academy. From West Point he went into service in the Mexican War, and was in every battle, save one, of the war that

gave to us an empire in wealth and territory; winning promotions for gallantry on the field. After the Mexican War he saw long service on the Western frontier. He entered the Civil War of 1861-65, and the greatest Confederate victories of that greatest war of civilized times are inscribed upon his battle-flags. The glories of Manassas, Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, the East Tennessee campaigns, the Wilderness, the campaigns about Richmond, and the last desperate struggles on the way to Appomattox, gather about his

name.

After the Civil War came the most trying period of his life, the dark days of reconstruction, the fierce dissensions between the sections, and between those holding different views in the same section, the hot feeling and prejudices of the time, the struggle to repair the ruined fortunes of war. When he was finally gathered to his fathers, at the ripe old age of eighty-three, he was still in harness, holding the position under the government of United States Commissioner of Railroads.

This busy, exciting, and strenuous life was calculated to develop in him the qualities of the soldier, the man of affairs, the blood and iron of nature rather than her gentler qualities. Nevertheless, his heart was as tender as a woman's, the sentiment and romance of his being never ceased to be exerted, and he exhibited to the last a tenderness of feeling and thoughtfulness regarding others which were in singular and beautiful contrast to the main currents of his life. This, I think, will appear without any special effort to show it as this sketch goes

on.

General Longstreet was born in Edgefield District, South Carolina, January 8, 1821. His early years were spent in the country. His father was a planter. Natural to him was all the vigor and fire of that heroic sec