never lost. It was she
who imbued her great son with an ineradicable belief in the efficacy
of prayer, and in the reality of God's interposition in the every-day
affairs of the true believer. No son ever returned a mother's love
with more heartfelt intensity. She was his idol, and he worshipped her
with the deep-seated inborn love which is known only to the son in
whom filial affection is strengthened by respect and personal
admiration for the woman who bore him. He was her all in all, or, as
she described it, he was both son and daughter to her. He watched over
her in weary hours of pain, and served her with all that soft
tenderness which was such a marked trait in the character of this
great, stern leader of men.

He seems to have been throughout his boyhood and early youth perfect
in disposition, in bearing, and in conduct--a model of all that was
noble, honorable, and manly. Of the early life of very few great men
can this be said. Many who have left behind the greatest reputations
for usefulness, in whom middle age was a model of virtue and perhaps
of noble self-denial, began their career in a whirlwind of wild
excess. Often, again, we find that, like Nero, the virtuous youth
develops into the middle-aged fiend, who leaves behind him a name to
be execrated for all time. It would be difficult to find in history a
great man, be he soldier or statesman, with a character so
irreproachable throughout his whole life as that which in boyhood,
youth, manhood, and to his death, distinguished Robert Lee from all
contemporaries.

He entered the Military Academy of West Point at the age of eighteen,
where he worked hard, became adjutant of the cadet corps, and finally
graduated at the head of his class. There he mastered the theory of
war and studied the campaigns of the great masters in that most
ancient of all sciences. Whatever he did, even as a boy, he did
thoroughly, with order and method. Even at this early age he was the
model Christian gentleman in thought, word, and deed; careful and
exact in the obedience he rendered his superiors, but remarkable for
that dignity of deportment which all through his career struck
strangers with admiring respect.

He left West Point when twenty-two, having gained its highest honors,
and at once obtained a commission in the engineers. Two years
afterward he married the granddaughter and heiress of Mrs. Custis,
whose second husband had been General Washington, but by whom she left
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