me."

"Stephen," she said, stirring the leaves at her feet, "you might have
taken me in your arms the night Judge Whipple died--if you had wanted to.
But you were strong enough to resist. I love you all the more for that."

Again she said:-- "It was through your mother, dearest, that we were most
strongly drawn together. I worshipped her from the day I saw her in the
hospital. I believe that was the beginning of my charity toward the
North."

"My mother would have chosen you above all women, Virginia," he answered.

In the morning came to them the news of Abraham Lincoln's death. And the
same thought was in both their hearts, who had known him as it was given
to few to know him. How he had lived in sorrow; how he had died a martyr
on the very day of Christ's death upon the cross. And they believed that
Abraham Lincoln gave his life for his country even as Christ gave his for
the world.

And so must we believe that God has reserved for this Nation a destiny
high upon the earth.

Many years afterward Stephen Brice read again to his wife those sublime
closing words of the second inaugural:--

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the
right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his children
--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations."

AFTERWORD

The author has chosen St. Louis for the principal scene of this story for
many reasons. Grant and Sherman were living there before the Civil War,
and Abraham Lincoln was an unknown lawyer in the neighboring state of
Illinois. It has been one of the aims of this book to show the remarkable
contrasts in the lives of these great men who came out of the West. This
old city of St. Louis, which was founded by Laclede in 1765, likewise
became the principal meeting-place of two great streams of emigration
which had been separated, more or less, since Cromwell's day. To be sure,
they were not all Cavaliers who settled in the tidewater Colonies. There
were Puritan settlements in both Maryland and Virginia. But the life in
the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which had
characterized that of the Royalists, even to the extent of affecting the
Scotch Calvinists, while the asceticism of the Roundheads was the keynote
o