It is one of the purposes of this magazine to aid in keeping ever fresh and green the history and traditions of the Old South; to keep alive its chivalrous spirit, and to tell the pathetic story of the lion-hearted men around whose names are woven some of the greatest events of history. It has been beautifully said that “literature loves a lost cause.” If this be true, the South will yet be a flower garden of the most enchanting literature that ever blossomed in any age or in any land. Some Homer will rise, greater than the Greek, and dream among the cemeteries where its heroes sleep and sing the sweetest Iliad ever sung! The spirit of another Hugo will brood over its battle fields and gather tales of valor and reckless courage; of grim visaged men scorning shot and shell and riding to the cannon’s mouth; of bayonets mixed and crossed; of angry armies clinching and rolling together in the bloody mire of the awful strife; of Death on the pale horse, beckoning the flower of the Old South to the opening grave! He will gather up the tears and prayers and the withered hopes of a dying nation; the piteous wails of pale and haggard maidens for lovers slain in battle; the shrieks of brides for grooms of a day brought back with pallid lips sealed forever and jackets all stained with blood; and the swoons of mothers with the kisses of fallen sons still warm upon their wrinkled brows. He will gather them up and weave them all into volumes of romantic love more vivid and terrible than the story of Waterloo! He will paint in burning words a picture, not of all the horrors that followed the blunder of Grouchy in that battle upon which hung the fate of empires, but of Stonewall Jackson falling in the noontide of his brilliant career and passing over the river to rest under the shade of the trees; a picture, not of Wellington seizing the fallen Napoleon and banishing him to solitude and death on a rock in the sea, but of the great and generous Grant receiving our own immortal Lee like a king at Appomattox, declining to accept his sword and bidding him return to the peaceful walks of private life among the green hills of old Virginia; a picture, not of Ney, who had fought so long and so bravely for the triumph of his beloved France, shot through the heart by cowards within the very walls of Paris, but of Gordon, with golden tongue portraying the last days of the Confederacy amid the shouts and tears of the brave men who had faced him with booming cannon and rattling musketry on a hundred fields of glory; a picture, not of the English Channel as the dividing line between the drawn swords of France and Britain, but of Mason and Dixon’s line healing into a red scar of honor across the breast of the great Republic and marking the unity of a once divided country! [Illustration: GOVERNOR NEWTON C. BLANCHARD, OF LOUISIANA. ] [Illustration: GOVERNOR N. B. BROWARD, OF FLORIDA. ] [Illustration: GOVERNOR JAMES K. VARDEMAN, OF MISSISSIPPI. ] [Illustration: