The older people found not less pleasure in the reunion than their juniors, and appeared to have grown young again. And while the youngsters were out on the grass at Miss Blair’s feet, in more senses than one, the General and Dr. Cary and the other seniors were on the vine-covered portico, discussing grave questions of state-craft, showing precisely how and when the Confederacy might have been saved and made the greatest power on earth—together with other serious matters. The General teased himself as of old about Miss Thomasia, and the Doctor teased them both. The General had been noted formerly as a great precisionist in matters of dress, as well as in all other matters, and now, when he stalked about the veranda, with his old uniform-coat buttoned to the chin as jauntily as ever, and with a limp bit of white showing above the collar and at the wrists, in which he evidently took much pride, the Doctor, who knew where the shirt came from, and that, like the one which he himself had on, it was made from an under-garment of one of the ladies, could not help rallying him a little. The Doctor wisely took advantage of Mrs. Cary’s absence from the room to do this, but had got no farther than to congratulate the General on the luxury of fresh linen and to receive from him the gallant assurance that he had felt on putting it on that morning, as a knight of old might have felt when he donned his armor prepared by virgin hands, when Mrs. Cary entered and, recognizing instantly from her husband’s look of suspicious innocence and Miss Thomasia’s expression, that some mischief was going on, pounced on him promptly and bore him off. When he returned from the “judgment chamber,” as he called it, he was under a solemn pledge not to open the subject again to the General, which he observed to the best of his ability, though he kept Miss Thomasia on thorns, by coming as near to it as he dared with a due regard to himself in view of his wife’s watchfulness. In fact, these men were thoroughly enjoying home life after the long interval of hardship and deprivation, and neither the sorrow of the past nor the gloom of the present could wholly depress them. The future, fortunately, they could not know. Then, among young people there must be joy, if there be not death; and fun is as natural as grass or flowers in spring or any other outbudding of a new and bounding life. So, even amid the ruins, the flowers bloomed and there were fun and gayety. Hope was easily worth all the other spirits in Pandora’s box put together.