The knightly spirit of the cavalier, that led their comrades to the opening grave, inspired the heroes who still survived, to face the dark and lowering future as bravely as they had faced the foe in the dreadful past; and buttoning on their tattered jackets of gray, their paroles of honor, they turned their tanned and tear-stained faces Southward and straggled back to Dixie to rebuild their ruined homes and raise the domes and spires of a new civilization in the air above the ashes of the old. Upon their faithful souls there is no stain of treason; upon their noble brows they wore no bloody wreath of conquest, but only the crown of honor. When impartial history shall be written by the truthful and the just, the names of these men who knelt at the shrine of the Old South and laid their hopes, their fortunes and their lives on its sacred altar, shall shine with the names of the world’s greatest heroes, and generations yet to be shall scatter flowers above their hallowed dust, as sweet tokens of their undying love and their devotion to the precious memories that cling about the folded Stars and Bars. [Illustration] To the jaded politician who has grown weary of fishing for votes and angling for suckers, there is surcease of sorrow in the brawling brooks of the mountains, where the genuine speckled trout plays hide and seek with the sunshine in the shoals, or sleeps in the darkening eddies, under the fragrant bloom of the overhanging honeysuckles. To the overworked public servant upon whose head the snows that never melt have too soon fallen, these bright, leaping, laughing, dashing, buoyant mountain rivers are the symbols of youth and the synonyms of happiness. On their grassy brinks he may sit and listen to the singing of his reel and the swish of his line, and watch the game black bass as he leaps up out of the middle of the stream, with the hook in his mouth, and flashes in the sunlight, and then darts back to make the reel sing and the line swish again. Or, if he wishes a diversity of sport and pleasure, I will lend him one of my shotguns and a pair of my leggings, and we will leave the trout and bass in the brook and brimming river and follow my brace of beautiful Llewellyn bird dogs, “Fiddle” and “Bow,” into the fields, and serenade the vanishing coveys with chilled shot and smokeless powder. In such a life, in such a land there is no snow upon the heart; ’tis always summer there. [Illustration]