After the surrender a poor Southern soldier was wending his way down the lane over the "red old hills of Georgia." His old gray jacket that his wife had woven and his mother made, was all tattered and torn; the old greasy haversack and cedar canteen hung by his side. From under his bullet-pierced hat there beamed eyes that had seen many a battlefield. Said one of his neighbors: "Hello, John; the Yankees whipped you, did they?" "No, we just wore ourselves out whipping them." "Well, what are you going to do now, John?" "Why, I'm going home, kiss Mary, and make a crop and get ready to whip 'em again." That "Mary" is our theme to-day. Others have told of Confederate soldiers on the battlefield. God help me to tell of the soldier's "other-self" behind the battlefield. The brave Southern army was defending home. The arm of the hero is nerved by his heart, and the heart of John was Mary, and Mary was the soul of the South. In peace woman was the queen of that Arcadia which God's blessings made our sunny land, and never has there been a war in which her enthusiasm was so intense and her heroic cooperation so conspicuous. Her effectual and practical work in the departments of the commissary, the quartermaster and the surgeon, and her magic influence at home and on the spirit of the army, were something wonderful. The Federal General Atkins, of Sherman's army, said to a Carolina lady: "You women keep up this war. We are fighting you. What right have you to expect anything from us?" And yet in all she was woman,--nothing but woman. "And the Lord said it is not good for man to be alone; I will make a help-meet for him." In Paradise she was the rib of man's side; in Paradise lost she bears woman's heavy share of his labors and his fate. The history of the South of 1861 will go down to the centuries with its immortal lesson that woman's power is greatest, her work most beneficent and her career most splendid when she moves in the orbit assigned her by Heaven as the help-meet of man. It is the glory of Southern life and society that with us woman is no "flaring Jezebel" but our own modest Vashti. Thank God the Confederate woman was no Lady Macbeth, plotting treason for the advancement of her husband; but the loyal daughter Cordelia, clinging to her old father Lear in his wrongs; no fanatical Catherine de Medici, thirsting for Huguenot blood, but the sweet Florence Nightingale, hovering over the battlefield with, "The balm that drops on wounds of woe, From woman's pitying eye,"