“You mean,” he said, “that they are Confederates. I want to see them.” And so, into the Confederate wards he went, greeting every sufferer as he passed, asking after their wants, bringing to all of them good cheer and hopefulness and helpfulness as he passed by. One boy of seventeen said to him:-- “My father knew you, Mr. Lincoln, before the war. He was killed at Chantilly. He said to me once: ‘Whatever happens, don’t you ever believe Abraham Lincoln guilty of harshness or cruelty.’ I am so glad to have told you that, Mr. Lincoln, before I die.” And Lincoln, as he pushed back the damp hair from the boy’s forehead, and inquired the father’s name, and saw the death pallor already stealing into the young face, said:-- “Thank you, my son. If I know my own heart, there has never been harshness or cruelty in it; there is no malice or bitterness in it to-day. I sympathize with you. I sympathize with all of you--” he lifted his head and looked around on the rapt faces turned toward him--“the more because your cause is a lost cause, because you are suffering also the bitterness of defeat. And yet I feel that, under God, this very defeat will prove the salvation of your beloved South.” And so he passed on. When he came to the cot where Rhett Bannister was lying, he gave him a word of simple greeting and would have gone by had not something in the man’s face attracted his attention and caused him to stop. “Have I ever seen you before?” he inquired. “Yes, Mr. President. I am Rhett Bannister from Pennsylvania. I spent a half-hour with you one morning in the Secretary’s room in the War Department, in the fall of ’63. I was an escaped conscript that morning.” A smile of recognition lit up the face of the President, and his gnarled hand grasped the hand of the wounded man. “I remember,” he said. “I remember very well. And have you been in the service ever since?” Some one across the aisle, who had heard the conversation, replied that time for Bannister. “Yes, Mr. President, he has. And he’s been the bravest and the best soldier in the ranks, bar none. I’m the adjutant of his battalion, and I know.” “Good!” exclaimed the President. “Oh, that’s very good. I felt that we’d make a good soldier of him in the end. And, let’s see! There was a boy whose place you took. The boy went home.” “No, Mr. President, he wouldn’t go, so we both stayed.” “The boy wouldn’t go home? What became of him?” “He’s here, Mr. President, on the next cot. We were both clipped at Five Forks.” The President turned half round and looked incredulously on the pale face of the youth at his side. Then he took the boy’s two hands in both of his, and bent over him. There was no grace in the movement, there was no beauty of face or smoothness of diction to add charm to the incident; but Bob Bannister will remember to his last hour on earth how the great War President leaned over him and spoke. “My boy, of such stuff are patriots and heroes made.”