“_Forgiveness to those who killed him?_” Let the question in all its bearings of responsibility for his death, be referred for answer to the Son of Man, whom God has appointed to judge the quick and dead! Meanwhile, let thy dismembered body, O, Pleasant Miller McClung, sleep on in the quiet grave of thy early manhood, until the morning of the resurrection of the dead! Then shalt thou meet those for whom thou didst pray forgiveness. And surely, thy unstudied petition was so like one that passed from the pale lips of the Man of Sorrows when expiring on the cross, that it must have gone up through Him to the throne of eternal grace. Sleep on, then, until that coming day! Multitudes, equally brave--wearing the blue or the gray--fell on sleep in the same mighty conflict. In many and crowded cemeteries the grass grows on lowly mounds over them, the white and pulseless marble glints in the shine of the sun as it rises and sets, and the birds sing their peaceful requiem in the air. And shall they not--a grand army, hundreds of thousands strong--come again to life? What if some are in unmarked graves? What if some graves have headstones that bear the sorrowful word, “Unknown?” _God knoweth!_ And they shall rise again, for He has said it. But if, in the generations hereafter, “Columbia” is indeed “to glory arise,” O ye, her sons, heed well the lesson taught by the war between her children in ’61-65. “The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water, therefore leave off contention, before there be quarreling.” In this Republic the avenues to employment are so many and wide open, that some measure of success awaits all who have capacity and diligence. Justly enough, a poor and obscure lineage does not prevent the rise to eminence or wealth of him who is worthy, nor are they to be attained by the son of rich or notable parents, who has no merit of his own. “Parson Brownlow,” in writing once for the public about some of his enemies to whom he attributed aristocratic pretensions, compared them to “turnips, the better part of which is under ground.” Still, wisely enough, men generally even under Democratic institutions, count an honest and industrious ancestry of some worth. By common consent, sons are to be commended who copy the virtues and good conduct of their fathers. One of the guests at a dinner party in Knoxville given to Gen. Burnside, said to him: “Andrew Johnson deserves great credit for having risen from poverty and obscurity to honorable distinction in the country.” The General was expected to reply in just the same strain of sentiment. His answer was: “Yes! but so does every man who inherits superior advantages and uses them wisely and faithfully.” And there are strong temptations to idleness and improvidence besetting the young man who is born to affluence and favorable opportunities, which it is meritorious in him to overcome, and with which the poor boy has never to struggle.