They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and trembles--liberty is trembling--“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages, words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the dollar at the moment! And now they come--Pickett’s men--down through the valley, in and out of groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straight into a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the men of the North waiting for them. That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dying now. The lips of Pickett’s men are turning white. The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Union men in their turn--father among them. It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and in memory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouse long enough to pull up his pants leg and show the scar of his wound. Father was a true naturalist, liked to pin his tales down to earth, put a spike of truth in them--at moments. He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to a victory in which he could have no part. He had fallen in what was now, suddenly, a little, quiet place among trees in an old orchard, and there close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The two men roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’s eyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one of them the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, over the river. The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as a boy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place--some twelve miles from his own father’s plantation--he used to ride for days of sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had! You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that very house, far back from the road, toward which father went that night when he escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over his shoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to his own home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of his final escape. And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming of a return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it had made were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned to remain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth. For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in his death hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.