By Robert L. Taylor. Delivered at the Confederate Reunion at Brownsville, Tenn., in August, 1902. Time in its tireless flight has brought us again to the full leaf and flower of another summer. The grass grows green about the dust of heroes; the roses twine once more about their tomb, and the morning-glories point their purple bugles toward the sky as if to sound a reveille to our immortal dead. Another year with its sunshine and its shadows, its laughter and its tears, its sowing and its reaping, its cradle songs and funeral hymns, now lies between us and that dark day at Appomattox when the star of Southern hope went down and the flag of Southern chivalry was furled forever. Another year has added whiter locks to the temples of those old veterans who wore the gray, and deeper furrows to their brows, and they now stand among us like solitary oaks in the middle of a fallen forest, hoary with age, covered with scars, and glorious as the living monuments of Southern manhood and Southern courage. [Illustration: SAM DAVIS. ] But we are not yet far enough away from that awful struggle to forget the bloody hills of Shiloh, where Albert Sidney Johnston died, and the fatal field of Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson fell. We are not yet far enough away to forget the frowning heights of Gettysburg, where Pickett’s charging lines rushed to glory and the grave. We are not yet far enough away to forget Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge and Chickamauga, and the hundred other fields of death and courage, where the flower of the South, the bravest of the brave and the truest of the true, fought for the cause they thought was right, and died for the land they loved. We are not yet far enough away to forget the agony and the tears of a nation that was crushed when the shattered armies of Lee and Johnston, weary, half-starved, bare-footed and in rags, stacked their arms in the gloom of defeat, and left the field of valor overwhelmed and overpowered, yet undaunted and unconquered. When time has measured off a thousand years, the world will not forget the sufferings and the sacrifices of the brave men who so freely gave their fortunes and shed their blood to preserve the most brilliant civilization that ever flourished in any land or in any age, for literature loves a lost cause. [Illustration: ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON. ] Historians will some day sit down on our battlefield and write true history—history that will surpass the wildest dreams of fancy that were ever woven into fiction; and poets will linger among our graves and sing sweeter songs than were ever sung before. For each monument is within itself a volume of wild and thrilling adventure, and every tombstone tells a story touching as the soldier’s last tear on the white bosom of his manhood’s bride, tender as his last farewell.