It was over. The music ceased, the frail voice of the chairman sounded its quavering invitation to prayer, and a clergyman arose and droned an invocation. The President was introduced and stood forward. He was well in view. One hand grasped the railing before him, the other clutched some separated papers, he looked well and the man’s vitality, his zealous unmitigated self exaction were realized. As he was seen, the tumult rose to a tremendous climax, cheers rolled forward and backward like the fluctuating billows of a sea; they receded to the outer margins far toward the Hagerstown road, where they vanished in murmurs, they crashed inward in volleying thunders, and the President stood erect, nerved to a steel-like rigidity; the air was swept with flags, the intoxication of the emotion increased, women palled before it, and men grew pale with the delirium of sudden enthusiasm. It seemed as if music alone could lead them back into the resignation of attention. It was a stupendous tribute. The man to whom it was given, had no reason for misgiving, no retributive judgments for his actions, to dread. Slowly, very slowly the cheering and cries died away, and then ensued a silence as remarkable and as impressive. The two contrasted states of the multitude might have been interpreted as a generous invitation to the man to speak, and as a judicial reservation of mind as to its own verdict when he had spoken. It almost seemed so, and the quick heart of the President might again have felt the palpitation of a doubt, whether he stood approved, or a critical people withdrew into the refuge of an impartial scrutiny. Leacraft felt all this, and he could not help also feeling a curious interest in the purely psychological enigma it presented. The President was speaking; his voice reached Leacraft thin and sharp: “My friends,” he began, “To-day we celebrate again the brave deaths of brave men, and the sacrifices they made for the maintenance of our common country. And we are gathered together on the battlefield which more than any other battlefield in that historic war, represented the culminating energies of both sides, the last vital contention for the mastery. These men left behind them the inestimable example of fortitude. And after the battle of Gettysburg it was more difficult for the southern man to continue the fight, in the face of disaster, with a depleted country behind him, and a foe flushed with victory, and drawing upon almost illimitable resources, than for his northern brother, for whom at last the tide of war seemed to have turned. We to-day need the lesson of this fortitude of the man in gray.