the time. It was drill through the day and dance through
the night.

"No sleep till morn when youth and pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet."

The boys were happy, and "all went merry as a marriage bell," and well
that it was so. When we looked into the hive we saw that the bees were
busy, but as far as human eye could discover, there was no head; all was
confusion; it was pushing and shoving and coming and going, and one
might have asked the question, What are they doing? What does it all
mean? If we could have seen farther into the hive we would have
discovered that back of this busy throng sat the queen, and that these
were her subjects, doing her bidding. She was sending out her little
rogues to rob the flowers, and they were coming back richly laden with
spoils. This was the raw material, and it was being worked up. When the
season was over and the flowers were dead, and we drew from the hive the
finished product, so perfect in all its parts and richly stored with
sweetened treasures, we began to realize that there was a master mind
behind it all. Do you suppose for a moment that when these young men and
boys of Virginia, in fact from all over the South, who were rushing with
such intense enthusiasm in the Confederate ranks, these fathers and
mothers and sisters, who were equipping these youths with comforts
without which they could not have endured the hardships of the camp, do
you suppose they were but following the dictates of a few maddened,
fire-eating fanatics, and that the whole would end in debt, death and
desolation? If you had lived in 1861 you might have been excused for
thinking so. But what do you think of it today, as the finished product
begins to unfold itself to our view? Do you not believe there was a
master mind behind it all, a King, and that these boys were but part of
His royal subjects, doing His will? Suppose there had been no rush and
no adequate army at Bull Run to meet McDowell and his forces as they
came marching out from Washington with flying colors? Suppose the
Confederates had been beaten at Bull Run and Richmond had fallen, and
the war had ended then? What miserable creatures we poor devils of the
South would have been! The world would have laughed at us. We would have
lost all of our self-respect. A cycle of time could not have wiped out
our self-contempt, and God might have said, "I cannot build up a great
nation with material like this." The North wo