history," but is history that
lives--in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded
letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great
houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields,
and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn
up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.

Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not
forget. The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that
remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the
South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever. If to err is
human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its
humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same
token, attained something like divinity.

Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have
understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.

Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in
those States which suffered the greatest hardships. I know, for
instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to
enter the Massachusetts Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and there
are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses
on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and
Stripes. The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the
South. Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother's
bridal wreath. When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe,
Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many
Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a
negro child. However, war had not then broken out in Europe. It would be
different now.

A Virginia lady told me of having gone to a dentist in Winchester,
Virginia, and having taken her little niece with her. The child watched
the dentist put a rubber dam in her aunt's mouth, and then, childlike,
began to ask questions. She was a northern child, and she had evidently
heard some one in the town speak of Sheridan's ride.

"Auntie," she said, "was Sheridan a Northerner or a Southerner?"

Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist
answered for her. "He was a drunken Yankee!" he declared vehemently.

When, later, the rubber dam was removed, the aunt protested.

"Doctor," she re