ng that we have forgotten
all about the biggest happening in our history--the thing that threw
over our civilization, wiped out our property, and turned our State into
a graveyard. If we forgot that, we wouldn't be Americans, because we
wouldn't be men."

He went on fragmentarily, ever and anon interrupting himself to give
individual ovations to his heroes and his gods:--

"Through the North and West you may have one old soldier to a village;
here we have one to a house. For you it was a foreign war, which meant
only dispatches in the newspapers. For us it was a war on our own front
lawns, and the way we followed it was by the hearses backing up to the
door. You can hardly walk a mile in any direction out of this city
without stumbling upon an old breastworks. And in the city--well, you
know all the great old landmarks, all around us as we stand here now. On
this porch behind us sits a lady who knew Lee well. Many's the talk she
had with him after the war. My mother, a bride then, sat in the pew
behind Davis that Sunday he got the message which meant that the war was
over. History! Why this old town drips with it. Do you think we should
forget our heroes, Mr. Queed? Up there in Massachusetts, if you have a
place where John Samuel Quincy Adams once stopped for a cup of tea, you
fence it off, put a brass plate on the front door, and charge a nickel
to go in. Which will history say is the greater man, Sam Adams or Robert
F. Lee? If these were Washington's armies going by, you would probably
feel a little excited, though you have had a hundred and twenty years to
get used to Yorktown and the Philadelphia Congress. Well, Washington is
no more to the nation than Lee is to the South.

"But don't let anybody get concerned about our patriotism. We're better
Americans, not worse, because of days like these, the reason being, as I
say, that we are better men. And if your old Uncle Sammy gets into
trouble some day, never fear but we'll be on hand to pull him out, with
the best troops that ever stepped, and another Lee to lead them."

Somewhere during the afternoon there had returned to Queed the words in
which Sharlee Weyland had pointed out to him--quite unnecessarily--that
he was standing here between two civilizations. On the porch now sat
Miss Weyland's grandmother, representative of the dead aristocracy. By
his side stood, clearly, a representative of the rising democracy--one
of those "splendid young men" who, the girl tho