Following this majestic and awe-inspiring pageant came the queerest collection of flotsam and jetsam ever gathered together--the “Bummers.” These were the stragglers that had attached themselves to the various corps, odd assortments of humans, animals, loot and salvage, hangers-on of Sherman’s March to the Sea, drift-wood clinging to the only anchorage that promised food and safety. They furnished the oddest parade ever seen in Washington before or since. Mules, goats, asses, horses, dogs, sheep, pigs, colts, raccoons, chickens, cats, and Negroes all ambling along contentedly as though their only object in life was to follow the army--as, indeed, it was. Each beast of burden was loaded to its carrying capacity with the odds and ends of camp luggage, equipment, and the queer lot of junk the soldiers had gathered “to carry home some day”--tents, knapsacks, hampers, sacks, bundles of clothing, boxes, valises, blankets, pots, kettles, fiddles, bird cages, camp stools, a few stray cradles, plenty of pickaninnies, and here and there, presiding over the lot, a black woman. Realism thus painted a living picture of the vicissitudes of the long weary march of destruction through the forests, swamps, plantations, and towns that came within the path of the blue-clad torrent which had swept all before it. In this epochal review were numbers of distinguished officers: Merritt, Macy, Benham, Griffin, Humphreys, Davies, Devin, Patrick, Woods, Carey, Hunter, Hancock, Ross, Blair, Ward, Smith, Nagle, Geary, and others, too many to enumerate with any degree of accuracy--names a grateful nation has since placed high upon the honour roll in her Memorial Hall of Fame. Most deservedly interesting of them all was the quiet, diffident man, with the three stars in his shoulder straps, the idolized commander of all of the armies of the North during the last year of the war--Ulysses S. Grant, whom Lincoln had chosen to bring peace to a sorely stricken land. A silent and unassuming observer, he seemed entirely unconscious that through his persistent and efficient service the Stars and Stripes were floating over a reunited nation. A tanner’s clerk with a series of mercantile failures behind him when the guns of Sumter opened the war, he was the honoured and loved commander of half a million veterans, with the faith and trust of a nation when it closed--the leader of the greatest army from every standpoint that any man had ever had subject to his call. Inarticulate in public, modest and silent by nature, General Grant’s pride and elation in the day’s event were manifest in the concentrated attention he gave to the passing marchers. His popularity demanded his almost constant response to the ovations to himself.