We did not think even then, you see, that the war was over. Our faith was still crediting superhuman powers to Lee and his skeleton army. Then there was President Davis’s proclamation issued from Danville, wherein we found encouragement for hope. Then came the blow. We heard that Lee had surrendered. Lee surrendered! that couldn’t be true! But even while we were refusing to believe it General Lee, accompanied, as I remember, by one or two members of his staff, rode up to his door. He bared his weary gray head to the people who gathered around him with greetings and passed into his house.
Hope was dead at last. But other things, precious and imperishable, remained to us and to our children—the things that make for loyalty and courage and endurance—an invincible faith—the enduring record of heroic example. Lee had surrendered, but Lee was still himself and our own—a heritage to be handed down by Americans to America when sectional distinctions have been swallowed up in the strength of a Union great enough to honor every son, whatever his creed, who has lived and died for “conscience’ sake.”
Sitting in my window that sorrowful day I saw three officers in gray uniforms galloping rapidly along Main Street. I recognized familiar figures in them all before they came as far as the Arlington. One turned out of Main Street, riding home to his wife, as I knew, before they reached the window; another did the same.
The third came galloping past.
I thrust my head out of the window.
“Walter!” I called.
He looked up.
“Hello, Nell!” he cried, waving his hat around his head and galloping on.
He was on his way to his bride from whom he had parted at the altar.
But even at this supreme moment of their lives he and Betty were good enough to remember me, and in a few hours after I hailed him from the window Walter called.