This paper is rapidly becoming what life is,--a series of renunciations,--and the reader is by this time sufficiently enlightened as to the reasons why I gave up the ambitious title Two Wars, and substituted A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War. If I were a military man, I might have been tempted to draw some further illustrations from the history of the two struggles, but my short and desultory service in the field does not entitle me to set up as a strategist. I went from my books to the front, and went back from the front to my books, from the Confederate war to the Peloponnesian war, from Lee and Early to Thucydides and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood my Greek history and my Greek authors better for my experience in the field, but some degree of understanding would have come to me even if I had not stirred from home. For while my home was spared until the month preceding the surrender, every vibration of the great struggle was felt at the foot of the Blue Ridge. We were not too far off to sympathize with the scares at Richmond. There was the Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in the war all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report that the Pawnee was on its way up James River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, just as all Athens was stirred, in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, by a naval demonstration against the Piraeus. The Pawnee war, as it was jocularly called, did not last long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to which the civilian soul naturally resorts in every time of trouble, were soon laid aside, and the only artillery to which the extemporized warriors were exposed was the artillery of jests. Even now survivors of those days recur to the tumultuous excitement of that Pawnee Sunday as among the memorable things of the war, and never without merriment. Perhaps nobody expected serious resistance to be made by the clergymen and the department clerks and the business men who armed themselves for the fray. Home guards were familiar butts on both sides of the line, but home guards have been known to die in battle, and death in battle is supposed to be rather tragic than otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made less tragic by the age of the combatant. The ancients thought a young warrior dead something fair to behold. To Greek poet and Roman poet alike an aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. No one is likely to forget Virgil's Priam, Tyrtaeus' description of an old soldier on the field of battle came up to me more than once, and there is stamped forever on my mind the image of one dying Confederate, "with white hair and hoary beard, breathing out his brave soul in the dust" on the western bank of the fair Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before, that same old Confederate, as a member of the awkward squad, would have been a legitimate object of ridicule; and so the heroes of the Pawnee war, the belted knights, or knights who would have been belted could belts have been found for their civic girth, were twitted with their heroism.