Perhaps they died in good time--before the dark hour came back again after a glorious morning and a cloudless noon. Perhaps it is well that the last of the Revolutionary veterans had passed beyond acute pain and heart-felt shame, before the attempt at national suicide came to embitter their last moments with the belief that after all they might have labored and suffered in vain. But their memory does not die. Mecca and Jerusalem are blended in the sacredness of that pilgrimage which the reverent heart travels back through the years to pay them; and if there is yet a leaven of self-sacrificing devotion in our national character sufficient to bear us on triumphantly to the great end, the yeast of true patriotism from which it is made was preserved through the long night of corruption and misrule, in the breasts of the Fathers of the Republic. Their children have long been old men now. Their very grandchildren begin to show gray hairs. Following close upon the steps of the Last Man of the Revolution--the last of the men who could say that they saw and took part in that throe which gave birth to a nation,--tread all those who can even say that they ever saw them and took them by the hand. A few years, and the last of these, too, will be quiet and voiceless. The chain of personal recollection is growing thin,--it may break to-morrow; and "the rest is silence." Such was the blood of Robert Brand, and such had been the influences and surroundings of his earlier life--himself a soldier when in possession of health and vigor, and the companion, friend and guardian of the noblest of all American soldiery when he became disabled and inactive. He loved his native land with an idolatry bordering on insanity; and during the long struggle between the interests of the sections, preceding the war, he had imbibed love of free institutions and hatred of slavery to a degree little less than fanatical. No regret had weighed so heavily upon him, when the note of conflict sounded in 1861, as the fact that his aged and crippled frame must prevent his striking one blow in a cause so holy; and if he held one pride more dearly than another, it was to be found in the remembrance that he had a noble and gallant son, too busy and too much needed at home, thus far, to join the ranks of his country's defenders in the field, but ready when the day of positive need should come, to maintain unsullied the honor of his race. What marvel, all these surroundings considered, that the knowledge of that son being an abject poltroon should nearly have unseated his reason, and that he should have uttered words which only the partial insanity of wounded pride and rankling shame could supply with any shadow of excuse?