Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
History
Joel Chandler Harris' life of Henry W. Grady including his writings and speeches
Grady, Henry Woodfin, 1850-1889
“He had visited his mother in Athens Christmas week, and he said: ‘I
don’t think I ever felt happier than when I reached the little home of
my boyhood. I got there at night. She had saved supper for me and she
had remembered all the things I liked. She toasted me some cheese over
the fire. Why, I hadn’t tasted anything like it since I put off my round
jackets. And then she had some home-made candy, she knew I used to love
and bless her heart! I just felt sixteen again as we sat and talked, and
she told me how she prayed for me and thought of me always, and what a
brightness I had been to her life, and how she heard me coming home in
every boy that whistled along the street. When I went to bed she came
and tucked the covers all around me in the dear old way that none but a
mother’s hands know, and I felt so happy and so peaceful and so full of
tender love and tender memories that I cried happy, grateful tears until
I went to sleep.’
“When he finished his eyes were full of tears and so were mine. He
brushed his hands across his brow swiftly and said, laughingly: ‘Why,
what are you crying about? What do you know about all this sort of
feeling!’
“He never seemed brighter than on that day. He had received an ovation
of loving admiration from the friends of his boyhood at his old home,
and these honors from the hearts that loved him as a friend were dearer
than all others. It was for these friends, these countrymen of his own,
that his honors were won and his life was sacrificed.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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