[THE BROKEN SWORD.]
[CHAPTER I.]
LOOKING BACKWARD.
I have surrendered at discretion to vagrant thoughts. Just as the idle school-boy will pause beside the limpid stream to watch its eddying waters as they go on and on, "never hasting, never resting," so I sit to-night in the haze of the years that are dead, with the mind sadly reminiscent, and I watch the shadows as they seem to sketch upon the memory the familiar faces of our loved and lost, and I hear their laughter and songs—grateful echoes from the realm of the long ago. I am gazing again upon the sepulchre of the old South, after the plowshare of war and reconstruction had run the last furrow. In the garnering of the red harvest did our men and women of the sixties maintain themselves with a proper decorum? Were they less patriotic, less self-sacrificing, less ready with heart and hand to divert the destructive revolution of principle than their fathers of '76, who in the upbuilding of republican institutions wavered not in their purpose; when the terror and ignominy of the scaffold were before them; when they knew their blood must cement the foundations of the structure they were rearing, and they themselves become the first sacrifice in the temple of liberty, which they were dedicating? In that epoch and since we have been making the grand experiment of self-government; not as Rome made it, when liberty there was only a name for licentiousness; not as Greece made it, when a demagogue swayed the deluded masses and lacked only a throne to make him a king; but with a constitution that should deserve the encomium of the people, for the unutterable blessings it should bestow; a constitution impervious to unjust exactions and unpatriotic suggestions, we hoped for a policy dictated in a spirit of compromise; but as I look back upon the eventful past, the first adventure of Gil Blas occurs to me. He had been furnished by his uncle with a sorry mule and thirty or forty pistoles, and sent forth to seek his fortune. He set out accordingly, but had not proceeded far from home, when, sitting on his beast counting his pistoles with much satisfaction, into his hat, the mule suddenly raised its head and pricked up its ears. Gil Blas looked around to see the cause of its alarm, and perceived an old hat upon the ground in the middle of the road, with a rosary of very large beads in it. At the same time he heard a voice addressing him in a very pathetic tone, "Good traveler, in the name of the merciful God, and of all the saints, do drop a few pistoles in the hat." Looking in the direction from which these words proceeded, he saw to his dismay the muzzle of a blunderbuss projecting through the hedge, and pointing directly at his head. Gil Blas, not much pleased with the looks of the pious mendicant, dropped a few pistoles in the hat and scampered away as fast as he could. This slight narrative presents to the mind of the writer the most perfect emblem of the pacific remedy of reconstruction in its beginning.
To the contemplative mind there is a melancholy pleasure in looking backward; as shadows will enter unbidden into the camera obscura, though every portal appears securely guarded; so memories will flit fantastically into the imagination when every approach seems closed against intrusion. I am looking backward, as it were, through a smoked glass, for a great sunburst is within the radius of vision, a sunburst that cheered our tired eyes with its thousand scintillant gleams in the hot days of August A. D. Nineteen Hundred.
Looking backward upon a picturesque civilization—upon the old homesteads and plantations of the South, with their hallowed associations and ideals—with their impedimenta not of human chattels, but of compact masses of freed slaves, the underpinning of that civilization in its concrete form.
I have asked the historian, the essayist, the chronicler, the clairvoyant, to aid me in the retrospection, but they answer dubiously. There is no trodden path that I may pursue. No friendly hand that I may clasp as I stride across fens and brakes, and morasses: even the echoes of receding footsteps, like the laughter of happy voices are hushed and dead "lang syne." There are faded letters however that I may read; broken swords and battered shields hanging upon decaying walls; moth eaten uniforms in garret and closet, that will guide me backward. The line of vision is traversed by unwieldy throngs of dilapidated men, in tattered gray clothes, without a federal head, without intelligent momentum, breaking up and dissolving like icebergs drifting southward; they are coming back home where there is neither grain for the sickle, nor hope for the husbandman: coming back to little cottages where lights in the windows kept burning for dear papa flickered and spumed, then died down into the rustic candlesticks, when the little watchful eyes so tired and weary, closed upon the moonlight that shimmered within the humble chamber.
Looking back over grave yards, where we reverently laid away our jewels to be placed by the Great Lapidary in His Crown by and by, when we shall all rise from our sleep and shine in His emitted glory. Looking backward over a strange realm, without boundaries or capitals, where there are no soldiers and no battle fields, and where every thing is so fragrant and ethereal. Here we may fashion pictures and weave around them gossamer draperies as insubstantial as this golden twilight.