Ah, Bob, my dear boy; it is all over!“Over, sir?” said I, with the greatest sincerity; “over? Why, sir, it has just begun. We are now where a good many of us have for a good while longed to be: Richmond gone, nothing to take care of, foot loose and, thank God, out of those miserable lines! Now we may be able to get what we have longed for for months, a fair fight in an open field. Let them come on, if they are ready for this, and the sooner the better.” One very inclement day in the early spring of 1865 I was leaving Richmond, about four or five o'clock in the evening, for the long, dreary, comfortless ride to Chaffin's Bluff. I cannot recall ever having been so greatly depressed. I passed Dr. Hoge's church and noticed the silent women in black streaming, with bowed heads, from all points, toward the sanctuary, and longed intently to enter with them; but I could not, as it would detain me too long from my post. Every face was pale and sad, but resolute and prayerful; while every window in the church-nay, every one in the doomed city — was shuddering with the deep boom of artillery. I passed on down Main street and, where the terraced Libby Hill Park now is, then a rough, unsightly place, I observed a little kid cutting some unusual capers on the brink of a precipitous bluff. He was evidently trying to force himself to make the perilous leap to the street below, but shrank from the test. Two or three times he trotted back a little
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but rather upon the inherently imperishable cause, the inherently unconquerable man. Fresh disaster each day did not affect our confidence.
We were quite ready to admit, indeed we had already contemplated and discounted anything and everything this side of the ultimate disaster; but that-never!
This was emphatically my position.
I well remember that after the evacuation and on the retreat,--indeed but one day before Sailor's Creek,--I left the line of march for an hour to see my mother, who was refugeeing in Amelia County, at the country home of a prominent gentleman of Richmond, beyond military age, who, when he saw me, exclaimed:
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