On a bright April day, 1861, books were closed in the old academy, there was the blare of bugle and roll of drum on the streets, people were hurrying together, and soon the roar of a cannon shook the building, as they told us of the bombardment of Sumter by the batteries of the young Confederacy. For months the very air had been vibrant with sound of drum and fife, of rattling musket and martial command. The Old South was soon a great camp of shifting, drilling soldiery. Every departing train bore to the front the raw and ungainly troops of the country, the trim city companies of State guards, and the gayly dressed cadets of the military schools. There were tender partings and long good-bys, so long to many of them that not yet has word of home greeting come. It seemed a great thing to be a soldier in those brave days when the girls decked the parting ones in flowers and sang to them “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Bonnie Blue Flag,” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” The scarlet and gold and gray, the flashing sword and burnished musket, the gay flowers and parting song, marked the beginning of that mighty death struggle of the Old South. Soon the gay song deepened into the hush before a great battle, or rose into the cry of the stricken heart over the long lists of wounded and slain. War grew grim and fierce and relentless. There were hunger and wounds, pale faces in hospital and sharp death of men at the front; and sleeplessness and heartache and holy privation and unfailing courage and comfort of Southern womanhood at home. Fiercer and hotter came the storm of battle, as the thin gray lines of Lee and Johnston confronted the soldiery and the resources of the world. Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Appomattox!—how these names, that wreathed with crape their thousands of hearts and homes, and marked the rise and fall of the battle tide, recall to us the passing of the Old South! On another April day in 1865, as a boy in Mahone’s Division, I looked my last into the face of the Old South and its great commander, who came riding down the line of our stacked guns, and, halting his old gray war horse Traveler, tried to comfort our hearts by saying: “It’s all over. Never mind, men; you have done your best. Go to your homes and be as brave and true as you have been with me.”