"Halt!" commanded the captain.
"What does this mean?" asked the surgeon.
"We are ordered to search this gentleman," was the explanation.
"This gentleman is my kinsman and my guest," said the surgeon.
After consultation with the officers the embarrassment was relieved by the countermanding of the order and Captain Bright departed with the precious messages in his pocket.
"The feeling of fear," he wrote, "came to me for the first time in all my life; not for myself but for that beloved old man who is dear now to us all."
Mr. Davis had not lived through those terrible four years without making enemies. Who in such a position could? But when he was made to suffer for the mistakes of the whole nation, every Southern heart went out in love to him, regardless of past antagonisms. All personal animosities, all political differences were forgotten, and the people were united in a loving sympathy with the toil-worn, feeble, sorrowful old man, as they never could have been by any gifts or favors which he might have heaped upon them had he won not only the object for which he had given his life, but the gold and jewels of a kingdom.
A generation later, when the people of the South met in Richmond to dedicate a monument to Jefferson Davis, they did not hold first in their hearts the memory of the statesman, the orator, the gracious gentleman, the President of the Confederacy. Above all the pictures that came thronging before them, as they recalled the life history of the man in whose honor they had met, was that scene in the gloomy cell and that bowed and feeble old man with the wounds of the irons upon him, in whose sad eyes the light of love shone as he reached out to greet a messenger of his own people and said brokenly: "My own! One of my own!"