for the truth's sake, all these battles must be fought over and over again, until the account is cleared, and until justice is done to the valor and skill of both sides.

The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to New York, their conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts went back into my own past, and two pictures came up to me from the time of the war.

In the midsummer of 1863 I was serving as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry. Gettysburg was in the past, and there was not much fighting to be done, but the cavalry was not wholly idle. Raids had to be intercepted, and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt himself too much; so that I gained some experience of the hardships of that arm of the service, and found out by practical participation what is meant by a cavalry charge. To a looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who charges, or is supposed to charge,—for the horse seemed to me mainly responsible,—the details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one of these charges some of us captured a number of the opposing force, among them a young lieutenant. Why this particular capture should have impressed me so I cannot tell, but memory is a tricky thing. A large red fox scared up from his lair by the fight at Castleman's Ferry stood for a moment looking at me; and I shall never forget the stare of that red fox. At one of our fights near Kernstown a spent bullet struck a horse on the side of his nose, which happened to be white, and left a perfect imprint of itself; and the jerk of the horse's head and the outline of the bullet are present to me still. The explosion of a particular caisson, the shriek of a special shell, will ring in one's ears for life. A captured lieutenant was no novelty, and yet this captured lieutenant caught my eye and held it. A handsomer young fellow, a more noble-looking, I never beheld among Federals or Confederates, as he stood there, bare-headed, among his captors, erect and silent. His eyes were full of fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, and his hair seemed to tighten its curls in defiance. Doubtless I had seen as fine specimens of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen without looking, and this man was evidently what we called a gentleman.

Southern men were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride,—foolish in itself, foolish in that it did not have the heraldic backing that was claimed for it; the utmost concession being that a number of "deboshed" younger sons of decayed gentry had been shipped to Virginia in the early settlement of that colony. But the very pride played its part in making us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid "deboshed," of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we all held to the same standard, and showed, as was thought, undue exclusiveness on this subject. But this prisoner was the embodiment of the best type of Northern youth, with a spirit as high, as resolute, as could be found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen; and though in theory all enlightened Southerners recognized the high qualities of some of our opponents, this one noble figure in "flesh and blood" was better calculated to inspire respect for "those people," as we had learned to call our adversaries, than many pages of "gray theory."