COMRADES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN--With sincere sentiments of good will, commingled with a sense of gratitude, I welcome you within the gates of our city, and no man has a better right to bid you come than myself--for, just after the surrender at Appomattox, I was sitting on the roadside, weary and worn, foot-sore and hungry, with an intense solicitude for a change of my bill of fare from parched corn, upon which I had luxuriated for about three days, when a kind-hearted private soldier of the Army of the Potomac, seeing my dejected and depressed appearance, came to me with words of cheer, comfort and kindness, and, putting his hand down into his not overstocked haversack, gave me all his rations of hardtack and bacon, and immediately the gloom of defeat ceased to be so oppressive, and the intense hunger, under which I had labored, also ceased. This act of good fellowship, under the conditions which confronted me, at once inspired a fraternal feeling for my enemy. So you see, Mr. Chairman, I have a real right to be glad to see here to-day the representatives of that army of which my benefactor was a member, and bid you be of good cheer while you pitch your tents once again on the old camp ground. You are now on a spot which is consecrated in the hearts of the soldiers from the North and the South. Within the sound of my voice Meagher's Irish Brigade immortalized itself by a charge into the jaws of death, a charge in which the Irishman expressed his loyalty to the land of his adoption, and gave evidence of that inborn bravery which has made his name illustrious all over the world. [Illustration: St. Mary's Catholic Church. (See page 214)] [Illustration: Shiloh Baptist Church, Old Site (colored.) (See page 215)] Within this county--at Chancellorsville--the soldiers of the South conquered in a battle where death pulsated the very air, which was won by unparalleled bravery and matchless strategy, though it cost the life of the southland's idolized Stonewall Jackson, the very genius of the war. Here the two master military leaders met for the first time at the Wilderness, where was commenced the march by parallel columns, which culminated in the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, by our grand old commander, Lee, to the great and magnanimous Grant.