in their sight, and upon him therefore, as representative, the
bitterness fell, not in words, but in averted looks, in sudden silences
when he approached, in withdrawals and avoidance, until he lived and
moved in a vacuum; wherever he went there was presently no one save
himself; the very shop-keeper who sold him sugar seemed turned into a
man of wood, and took his money reluctantly, although the shilling
gained stood perhaps for that day's dinner. So Rodman withdrew himself,
and came and went among them no more; the broad acres of his domain gave
him as much exercise as his shattered ankle could bear; he ordered his
few supplies by the quantity, and began the life of a solitary, his
island marked out by the massive granite wall with which the United
States Government has carefully surrounded those sad Southern cemeteries
of hers; sad, not so much from the number of the mounds representing
youth and strength cut off in their bloom, for that is but the fortune
of war, as for the complete isolation which marks them. "Strangers in a
strange land" is the thought of all who, coming and going to and from
Florida, turn aside here and there to stand for a moment among the
closely ranged graves which seem already a part of the past, that near
past which in our hurrying American life is even now so far away. The
Government work was completed before the keeper came; the lines of the
trenches were defined by low granite copings, and the comparatively few
single mounds were headed by trim little white boards bearing generally
the word "Unknown," but here and there a name and an age, in most cases
a boy from some far-away Northern State; "twenty-one," "twenty-two,"
said the inscriptions; the dates were those dark years among the
sixties, measured now more than by anything else in the number of
maidens widowed in heart, and women widowed indeed, who sit still and
remember, while the world rushes by. At sunrise the keeper ran up the
stars and stripes; and so precise were his ideas of the accessories
belonging to the place, that from his own small store of money he had
taken enough, by stinting himself, to buy a second flag for stormy
weather, so that, rain or not, the colors should float over the dead.
This was not patriotism so called, or rather miscalled, it was not
sentimental fancy, it was not zeal or triumph; it was simply a sense of
the fitness of things, a conscientiousness which had in it nothing of
religion, unless indeed a ma