[72]
and desolation reigned supreme.
He had now a wife to care for, besides others dependent on him, and, without any idle repining at the malice of fortune, at once went to ‘work with a will.’
Of his life after the war there is small need to speak.
It was the same as that of the great majority of his old comrades.
Enough to say, that he illustrated in every task he essayed that pithy dictum of a great English thinker that ‘the reward of one duty is the power to fulfil another.’
His wife now fortunately came into her property, and he himself again accumulated a comfortable competence, which within a few years was lost through misplaced confidence in others.
Once more with no repining, he began the battle of life, this time as a simple farmer, and thenceforth devoted himself in chief measure to advancing agricultural interests throughout the Commonwealth, being for years prominently identified with the revived State Fair and active in the management of other kindred organizations.
A simple farmer he indeed continued to the end outwardly, but in his ‘heart of heart’ (as Hamlet hath it), he always remained a soldier.
He was never ‘reconstructed’ and disdained to pretend that he was. He was not ‘glad that the war ended as it did,’ and was not slow to express his virile scorn for those who thus ‘bowed down in the House of Rimmon.’
For the past two or three years, his health had been steadily failing, but the spirit of the man was invincible, and he never for a moment abated his activities, so that when the blow fell at last, his death proved a great shock to family, kinsmen and friends.
On October 15th, after a few days' illness, he passed quietly away at ‘Millwood,’ ‘surrendering his pure soul unto his Captain, Christ.’
He lived in a great time and bore himself through all the ‘stress and storm’ of it in a manner worthy of his historic lineage.
After the war there were long years in which he was tried as by fire, but he ever proved all gold.
And he has left to wife
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Richmond, VA. 1909.
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