alute were muffled in black. All decorations
were taken down, and the church bells tolled mournfully. The grief of
the people was beyond speech. Each one felt a personal loss.

At the home the blow was terrible. The lover-husband would not leave
his wife. In those bitter hours the highest gift of his countrymen
was an empty triumph, for his soul was wrecked with the greatness of
his loss.

When she was buried at the foot of a slope in the garden of "The
Hermitage," his bereavement came home to him with crushing strength.
Back of the open grave stood a great throng of people, waiting in the
wintry wind. The sun shone brightly on the snow, but "The Hermitage"
was desolate, for its light and laughter and love were gone. The
casket was carried down the slope, and a long way behind it came the
General, slowly and almost helpless, between two of his friends.

The people of Nashville had made ready to greet him with the blare of
bugles, waving flags, the clash of cymbals, and resounding cheers. It
was for the President-elect--the hero of the war. The throng that
stood behind the open grave greeted him with sobs and tears--not the
President-elect, but the man bowed by his sixty years, bareheaded,
with his gray hair rumpled in the wind, staggering toward them in the
throes of his bitterest grief.

In that one night he had grown old. He looked like a man stricken
beyond all hope. When his old friends gathered around him with the
tears streaming down their cheeks, wringing his hand in silent
sympathy, he could make no response.

He was never the same again, though his strength of will and his
desperate courage fought with this infinite pain. For the rest of his
life he lived as she would have had him live--guided his actions by
the thought of what his wife, if living, would have had him do--loving
her still, with the love that passeth all understanding.

He declined the sarcophagus fit for an emperor, that he might be
buried like a simple citizen, in the garden by her side.

His last words were of her--his last look rested upon her portrait
that hung opposite his bed, and if there be dreaming in the dark, the
vision of her brought him peace at last.

The Bachelor President's Loyalty
to a Memory

The fifteenth President was remarkable among the men of his time
for his lifelong fidelity to one woman, for since the days of
knight-errantry such devotion has been as rare as it is beautiful. The
young lawyer came o