tears on Memorial Day, to gladden my spirit taking note. This would sometimes be my thought, and thousands of others had like thoughts. Early in this time of sorrow and suffering the women of the south instituted Memorial Day. Each year when it comes they do rites of remembrance to the fallen soldiers of the confederacy. These soldiers lie in every graveyard from the Ohio and Potomac to the Rio Grande. When the day comes these women in their unforgetting love assemble the people, have praises and lamentations of their dead darlings fitly spoken; and then they deck their graves with the fairest flowers of spring. It is an annual holiday, sacred to grief for our heroes who died in vain. It is the fairest, tenderest, and sweetest testimonial of love ever given--love from those who have nothing else to bestow, lavished upon those who can make no return; and it is further the most splendid and glorious, being the co-operative demonstration of a whole people of "true lovers."[137] I cannot say where and when the observance of Memorial Day began. Perhaps Miss Davidson correctly asserts that it was in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1866.[138] It had reached its height at Charleston, South Carolina, in the spring of 1867, when as prelude to decorating the graves in Magnolia cemetery, Timrod's hymn, containing this oft-quoted passage, was sung: "Behold! your sisters bring their tears, And these memorial blooms. "Small tributes! but your shades shall smile More proudly on these wreaths to-day, Than when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this bay. "Stoop, angels, hither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned." The "true lovers" could no more forget their living leader in prison than they could forget their soldiers in the grave. "Out of sight, out of mind" could not be said of Davis during his two years' confinement. The concern of his people mounted steadily. They made all his sufferings their own, lamenting and praying for him as a loved father. When he was about to be released on bond the news gave the south a wilder joy than did the unexpected victory of First Manassas. He was brought in custody to Richmond by a James river steamboat. Mrs. Davis thus describes how he was received: