It was certainly a grand privilege to go all through a great war and be permitted to come home with one’s own comrades. To be present at the last roll call. To hear the clatter of the bayonets as the battle-scarred muskets are stacked for the last time. To see the furling of the tattered colors that one has followed for four years. To hear the last command of the officers, the last tattoo and the final “taps.” There never was such another bugler in the whole army of the Potomac as our little Gracey. Small of stature, gentle by nature, but a marvel with his trumpet. I have told in a former chapter how at Cold Harbor, after sounding the charge for Gen. Hancock’s troops, he sat down by a tree and wept like a child when he saw the lines of mangled, bleeding men returning. Gracey was at our last dress parade at Hart’s Island, New York, and after the parade the guns were stacked for the last time, and then Gracey sounded “taps” or “lights out” as it was always called in the army. The call is one of the sweetest, yet saddest of all the army calls and on this occasion our old bugler seemed to breathe his very soul into his trumpet, for the tears were trickling down his cheeks while strong, bronzed men who had walked up to the cannon’s mouth on many a famous battlefield were not without emotion as they broke the ranks for the last time and bade farewell to their old comrades. My father and I got out of the old stage coach at Carthage two days later, and as we alighted he remarked that it was just four years to a day since he had left for the war, and I found that my services figured up over three years and a half. CHAPTER XX. SCATTERING REMINISCENCES. A COMRADE’S LOVE. James Tabor and Dennis Garrity were about the last two soldiers that would have been taken for chums. Garrity was a great thick-chested Irishman with brawny arms and a roistering sort of manner who had served through the Crimean war and knew more of tactics in the first year of the Civil war than half of our officers. Tabor was scarce more than a boy, a slender, palefaced youth, mild of manner and gentle of speech as a girl. Tabor’s mother had given him a little pocket Bible when she kissed him good-bye, and, unmindful of the jeers of his comrades, he read it every evening and knelt and offered up a silent prayer before wrapping himself in his blanket. When the first death occurred in our camp we had no chaplain. Tabor was called upon to read the burial service and make a prayer. After that some of the boys tried to tease him by calling him “parson.” AN OLD-FASHIONED GARDEN. Away up in York state there was an old-fashioned flower garden with roses, hollyhocks, sweet-williams, larkspurs, marigolds, lady-slippers, pansies, violets and other emblems of purity and the simple life. The boy had loved that old garden, so when it came summer he had a little reminder of it with a box of pansies by the side of his tent.