When the end had come both officers and men surrendered as they had fought,--without mental reservation. Sadly they furled and yielded up the bullet-riddled battleflags they had carried so proudly. Now while they manfully accept the hard arbitrament of war, and yield unaffected loyalty to the United States, they make no confession of criminality. While the war continued they were asserting what they believed was a God-given right, and now they recall with pride the valor and victories of the Southern armies. Those armies are rapidly disappearing from the land they loved so well. Many of the men fell in battle, and many died in prisons and hospitals, and since the close of the war more of them have fallen asleep in peaceful homes. Those who have departed and those who survive will not want a eulogist while one remains; and when the last of the men who wore the gray shall have joined his comrades beyond the river of death, coming generations will celebrate their heroism and scatter flowers upon the mounds that mark the places where their ashes repose. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's Reminiscences of a Rebel, by Wayland Fuller Dunaway