"There was little to earn and many to keep—"
and every month it seemed to grow harder and harder to make the bare means of life. And not alone did the men work—hard and steadily, early and late. As the women of the South had been the counsellors, the comforters, the very life of the soldiers when the dark hour was threatened; so they proved themselves worthy helpmeets now that it had come.
No privation was too great, no work too unaccustomed for them to undergo. Little hands that had never held even a needle until the war, now wrought laboriously at the varied—sometimes even menial—occupations that the hour demanded. And they worked, as they had borne the war—with never a murmur; with ever a cheering word for the fellow-laborer beside them—with a bright trust in the future and that each one's particular "King should have his own again."
And here the author's task is ended—albeit far from completed; for so little has been told, where there was so much to tell. But, there was no longer a Rebel Capital, to offer its inside view; and what followed the fall—were it not already a twice-told tale—has no place in these pages. Disjointed sketches, these have perchance told some new, or interesting, facts. Certes, they have omitted many more, well worth the telling, noted during those four unparalleled years; but plainly not compressible, within the limits of one volume.
Happily, the trials, the strain, the suffering of those years remain with us, but as a memory. That memory is, to the South, a sacred heritage which unreasoning fanaticism may not dim—which Time, himself, shall not efface. To the North that memory should be cleared of prejudice and bitterness, becoming thus a lesson priceless in worth.
Happily, too, the sober second thought of a common people, aided by the loyalty of the South—to herself and to her plighted faith—has changed into recemented union of pride and of interest, that outlook from the crumbled gates of Richmond, which made her people groan in their hearts:
Solitudinem faciunt appellantque pacem!
FINIS.
APPENDIX.