Voices suddenly rose high in altercation and abuse. A farmer whose rickety wagon, laden with his sons and daughters, had got packed between a curb and a particularly dense fragment of the crowd, made up of vituperative young men, and was in almost certain danger of being upset, was engaged in a lusty expostulation not unassisted by the quick and sharp lashes of his whip, over the heads of the dodging group. The latter, not averse to some retaliatory measures that might serve the purpose of freeing their general resentment at their imprisonment, attacked the irate proprietor of the wagon and pushed his shivering vehicle over, spilling its screaming and swearing occupants upon the heads of the bystanders, who were utterly unable to escape, and added their din to the commotion.
This diversion, attended with laughter, shouts and cries of pain, had nearly subsided, when a new and more alarming disorder arose in the neighborhood of the Garrett party, who had betaken themselves to the porch of one of the souvenir shops. A wandering and aimless dog, suffering from kicks and repulses, had turned on some of its persecutors, and, yelping and snapping with inflamed and frightened eyes, had suddenly been diagnosed, by an inconsiderate observer, as “mad.” This information, as usually, proclaimed in a loud, denunciatory tone, raised in a second an indescribable hubbub. Room to run from the bewildered canine was not to be found, and the only thing to do for those in the vicinity, was to squeeze more violently against their companions, leaving a slender and irregular space in which the dog gyrated, biting at friend and foe alike. The undulous area of movement thus formed swayed to and fro, with the distracted struggles of the dog, and soon swung violently towards the Garretts, who became rudely jolted and pressed by frantic men and women, in whose legs apprehension of the dog’s teeth seemed to have produced extraordinary motions, for they shuffled and kicked and scrambled in a way very undignified and ridiculous. The upshot of it was to drive a frenzied pack of people towards the souvenir shop, in the hope of entering the shop, and evading the wretched canine somewhere beneath their skirts and trousers—an absurd design, as the shop itself was solid with condensed humanity.
Brig Barry saw the danger, and quickly hustling Sally and Mrs. Garrett between the men of his party, told all to stand firmly, after knitting their arms within each other, forming an elastic and impenetrable wall. As it was, the colliding tides around them sent them on an unexpected orbit of translation, and a few minutes later they found themselves pushed towards the trolley tracks, not far from the dishevelled and malign looking local hotel, but in a less exposed and stormy quarter.
And now a marvellous change took place. The barriers were down; the rolled up soldiers opened the avenues of approach; the President, members of his Cabinet, the Commissioners of the Reservation, and the veterans of the North and the South, were in place, and the delayed populace, released from its confinement, with instantaneous expansion, hurried over the roads and fields to the station of the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge. It was a picturesque spectacle. When the condensation was removed, it became apparent in how much splendor the girls and women of the country and the near and distant towns had been arrayed. They came from Harrisburg, from Emittsburg, along the fatal road that Longstreet’s rangers followed, from Taneytown, from Hagerstown, where Lee’s army had its rendezvous before the battle of Seminary Ridge; from Chambersburg, which Ewell had dragooned; from Wrightsville, where Early was balked by the burning of the Susquehanna Bridge, on the 29th of June; from Newville, from Hanover, from Fairfield, the belles and beaux had gathered, and with them no indifferent number of their fathers and mothers. They wore their best ginghams, and calicoes, and silks; the ancient trouseaus, refitted and remade, still imparted the aspect of richness to their wearers, who, ensconced beside their furrowed and tanned husbands, also refurbished, so to speak, with store clothes and a rainbow neck-tie, felt the novelty of life return, and something of the freshness of the glad morning of existence. The girls were most happy and the boys voluble and attentive. The caravan of vehicles would have tasked the vocabulary of Tattersalls, though it was not altogether so remarkable for the variety of its contents as the indefinite suggestion of varied ages in its parts. And here and there some time-worn carryall creaking under the infliction of an unusual load, and drawn by some Rosinante, whose feeble gait and frequent halts betokened a sad contemporaneity with the vehicle itself, offered a pathetic note in the hurrying splendor of the congregated regalia of the barn and stable and garage.
The Garretts, once extricated from their embarrassed position, armed with passports, one in the hands of Brig Barry, and a special card in the possession of Mr. Garrett, as guest of the Chamber of Commerce of Baltimore, had little difficulty in securing the essential indulgences for a delightful day. In a three-seated coach wagon, with a splendid team of horses, they bowled along as far as the beginning of Hancock avenue, which leads from the National Cemetery to the Round Tops. Here they alighted and surveyed the wondrous scene. It was resplendent. A sun burning with the soft brilliancy of June bathed the grand distances towards the Blue Hills in light, while the Blue Hills themselves receded with artistic forbearance behind an atmosphere that veiled them in an evanescent purple and yet seemed to magnify their height. The slopes of Cemetery Ridge were covered by people, and the lower levels where the Codori farm buildings stood; the Peach Orchard, where Sickles and Longstreet met for the mastery; the grain field beyond, over whose long stretches Pickett’s charge was made, were filled with moving groups. The distant woods, the nearer groves, the grassy fields, Little and Big Round Top, all were transfigured in the golden blaze, and the innumerable monuments that gave the park-like Ridge a sort of scenic artifice, seemed to become accordant, in the vastness of the panorama, with its natural and simple features. The farm lands, the white houses, dotting fields, or emerging with human interest from lines of shadowing trees, the peace of the distant perspective, accorded a welcome contrast to the foreground of the picture, immersed in the waves of a popular assembly.
Automobiles flying like clouds rushed along the far away roads, bicycles in undulating and streaming lines, grew large with rapid approach; the gathering spots of people merged together and became irregular squares, the squares united and became tracts, and the tracts, by an incessant accretion, coincided along their edges until Cemetery Ridge, the slopes towards Little Round Top and the field below the “angle,” where Cushing and Armistead died, were unbrokenly covered with the vast congregation, pulsating ceaselessly by an interior agitation everywhere.
The heterogeneous assortment of conveyances were halted near the National Cemetery, and the people made their way to the enclosure, where the President was to address them, along the triumphal monument-enfiladed boulevard of Hancock avenue.
The Garrett party had noticed the earnestness and apparent preoccupation of the people. The news of the previous night had spread its sinister announcements through the papers of the country, carried to every village on the myriad fingered currents of the telegraph. It had left its impress in the serious, sombre and sometimes dully frowned faces of the men. “I feel sorry for the President,” said Sally. “The Canal seemed almost himself, and the people thought of it and him together. What will he do?”
“The President,” answered Ned Garrett, “will not flinch. Ever since he went down to the Isthmus in 1906, and made the dirt fly, he has watched the Canal with his whole heart in it. He knew what it meant for the country, for the world, and now”—the speaker hesitated—“he will know what to say and do. How I believe in that man!”
“But I can’t see,” continued Brig Barry, “that the idea of the Canal is lost. Let us suppose there is a shifting and readjustment down there. The two oceans are left behind, not much different, and if the isthmus breaks down, splits up, and goes to thunder, there’s water enough to cover the remains, and we have the Canal anyway.”