The General’s favorite hymns were sung; a prayer was said. The casket was taken from its place in the great hall and carried to the tomb awaiting him in the garden by Rachel’s side. A firing squad raised their muskets and a military salute shattered the hush of the warm summer morning. The smoke from the guns floated upward through the heavy foliage of the overhanging magnolias; the military company formed in ranks and briskly marched off; the crowd dispersed; the sorrowing family walked slowly back up the garden path to the house; a cloud of dust rose over the road as the carriages of the notable citizens of Nashville started back to town. Andrew Jackson, after a tempestuous life of 77 years, was at rest by the side of her of whom he had said: “Heaven will be no heaven for me if she is not there.” No more would his vivid personality leave its impress on public affairs. No more would the parlors’ walls reëcho his shrill voice as he sang “Auld Lang Syne.” No more would a crowd of guests about the big table in the dining room listen attentively as he told of some incident of the wars. No more would the papers on his office desk rattle as he crashed down his fist and stormed “No! by the Eternal!” The spark of his existence, which made the Hermitage a beacon of democracy, was extinguished. He has been gone now for nearly a century; his body still rests in the stone vault in the garden where loving hands placed it that hot June day in 1845. But, somehow, it is impossible to visit the Hermitage today, standing just as it was when he left it, without experiencing a mysterious feeling of his presence in the old house. Maintained though it is as a public shrine, the visitor when crossing the threshold has the sensation of entering into a living home; and it requires but little sense of the mystic to feel that he might look up and see the tall, angular form of the General come slowly down the sweeping circular stairway to greet the wayfaring guest. Throughout the life of Andrew Jackson he was like a part of the old house which held so large a place in his heart; and today it is as though that part of him had never died. Indefinably it seems as though some elusive fragment of the spirit of Old Hickory is still there; and few of those who come there go away without experiencing that feeling of inspiration which arises from close contact with the deathless spirit of a great man. APPENDIX A: CHRONOLOGY