I lift the curtain and see the old South enthroned amid the luxuries of peace and plenty. Heaven never smiled upon a happier people nor upon a land more beautiful; the eagles never soared under softer skies. I see the white-columned mansions of the masters rising in groves of maple and live oak, where perfect types of Caucasian beauty are wooed and won by men as brave and courtly as ever shivered lances in the romantic days when knighthood was in flower. I see the snowy cotton fields stretching away to the horizon, alive with toiling slaves who, without a single care upon their hearts, sing as they toil from early morn till close of day; and when their task is done I hear them laughing and shouting at the negro quarters in the gathering shadows of the evening. I see them swinging corners in the old Virginia reel to the music of the banjo and the fiddle and the bow, until the dust rises above them and swings corners with the moonbeams in the air. I see the old black mammies soothing their masters’ children to sleep with their lullabies. I see the whole black race rejoicing in their transplantation from darkest Africa and gladly serving the white race who led them into the light of civilization and the Christian religion, leaving not an infidel among all those millions of slaves. I lift the curtain and look again. I hear the tocsin of war. Unfaltering courage and high-born chivalry with shimmering epaulets of gold and bright swords gleaming proudly rode to glory and the grave; bayonets glittered under the silken folds of the Stars and Bars, the shrill fife screamed and the kettle drum timed the heavy tramp of the shining battalions as the infantry deployed into line; and thunder-tongued batteries unlimbered on the bristling edge of battle; a sea of white plumes nodded to the music of Dixie and ten thousand sabres flashed as the cavalry hovered on the flanks and rear awaiting the bugle signal for the charge. Then came the blinding flash and the awful thunder peals where angry columns in frenzied fury met and the hills were strewn with the dead and dying, and the very furrows of the fields ran blood. They were fighting for their homes and the civilization of their fathers as forward with the fierce and daring rebel yell the intrepid armies of Lee and Jackson rushed into a hundred carnivals of death. Once more I lift the curtain and see their decimated and half-starved columns, ragged and bare-footed, exhausted and encompassed by overwhelming numbers, reel backward in defeat and anguish at Appomattox; the harp of Dixie is hung on a willow tree and the flag of its hope and glory goes down in a flood of tears. Despair swept the harp strings of Father Ryan’s heart, and the South’s poet priest poured out his soul in song: