end; and it stared Lee in the face. But on such a sight Lee had not at first the moral strength to open his eyes. The pain was too blinding. In his youth he had taken an oath to support the government. That government had educated him to be a soldier. He had been against Secession. But, when the time came to choose between Secession and his oath, he chose (not without reluctance) to break his oath, and turn against the government the teaching it had given him. And now here he sat, with his lost cause like a broken idol in his hands. For a moment he shrank from the final pang of renunciation. "I have received your note," he replied to Grant on that same Friday. "Though not entertaining the opinion you express of the hopelessness of further resistance, I reciprocate your desire to avoid useless effusion of blood, and therefore ask the terms you will offer." And Grant on Saturday replied, "Peace being my great desire, there is but one condition-that the men and officers surrendered shall be disqualified for taking up arms until properly exchanged." And then follows a touch of his perfect consideration for the defeated opponent: "I will meet you or will designate officers to meet any officers you may name." So did Washington write to Cornwallis, as Horace Porter reminds us. But Lee would himself go through with whatever had to come. Only still he pushed the bitter cup away from him. "I cannot meet you with a view to surrender," he answered; "but, as far as your proposal may tend to the restoration of peace, I shall be pleased to meet you." And he named Sunday morning, on the old stage-road between the picket lines.

This disappointing word came to Grant in the heart of the night, where he lay sleepless from many hours of pain in his head. Hunger, fatigue, exposure, and strain had brought on such torments that he had allowed remedies to be tried, but without avail. He lay down again. In the early hours he was found walking up and down outside, holding his head with both hands. He now wrote a third time to Lee that he had no authority to treat of peace, but that peace could be had, and lives and property saved, by the South's laying down their arms. An urgency,

almost an appeal, pervades this letter. He then declined advice to take an ambulance for the sake of his severe pain, and, mounting once more, proceeded toward Sheridan's front. It was near noon now; and, as he went, a despatch overtook him. Time and further mischances had brought Lee to the point. He requested an interview for the purpose of surrender according to the terms offered. As Grant read and understood that here in his hand at last lay peace, all pain left him. He dismounted, and by the roadside wrote his answer. While he was doing this, and hurrying forward to the meeting, Lee some six miles away lay waiting.

Stretched on a blanket under an apple-tree by the road, he contemplated the sunshine that bathed Virginia. Of his thoughts, also, only his actions reveal anything. When Grant's note reached him, he rose, and had soon ridden into Appomattox Court-house, and in a house there waited for Grant. In a little while Grant reached the grassy village street; and there, dismounted, stood Sheridan and others. No significant words were spoken in this hour. Silence is the only reference that men make to great events which they are in the midst of. The ordinary greetings of every day were briefly given. The house where General Lee waited was pointed out to Grant; and he went in, leaving most of the others upon the porch. There they sat, while General Lee's gray horse cropped the grass near them. Quietness was over the little village and the armies lying in the country round. The door opened, and two of those on the porch were signed to come in. They entered, it is said, treading as those do who steal into a sick-chamber, while the rest still sat on the porch. When the door next opened, they rose. For out of it General Lee came, splendid, tall, grey-bearded, immovable. They looked at him and his sword and spotless grey uniform. He stood absently on the step, gazing away across Virginia; and two or three times he struck one hand against the other. Then, having spoken no word, and noticing his grey horse that had been brought him, he mounted, and rode away. As he was going, Grant came through the door, saluted him in silence, and in silence also rode away. When Lee reached his army, the faithful men swarmed around him, cheering not their common misfortune, but the peace that he had made. They mingled their grief with his, grasping his hands; and then, almost overcome, he spoke: “Men, we have fought through the war together. I have done the best I could for you."

What Grant's features concealed on that day we know now from him: "What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. But my own, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

But, inside the house, what had gone on between the two chiefs? The witnesses watched and moved always with the hush of a sick-room. And after the first greeting, when they sat down, it became Grant who shrank from the point. He talked to Lee about Mexico and old times, and how good peace was going to be now; and twice Lee had to remind him of the business they had to do. Then Grant wrote, as always, simple and clear words. In the middle, his eye fell upon Lee's beautiful sword;

and the chivalric act which it prompted has knighted his own spirit forever. "The surrender," he instantly wrote, "would not embrace the sidearms of the officers, nor their private horses or baggage." When Lee's eyes reached that sentence, his face changed for the first time; and he said, "This will have a very happy effect upon my army." He then told what was new to Grant, that the horses ridden by the men were their own. Again the conqueror's tenderness lifted him into a realm diviner than the renown of victory. He ordered that the men "take the animals home with them to work their little farms." To this nobility Lee's own. responded. "This will have the best possible effect upon the men," he said. Moved to greater frankness, he told Grant of his army's hunger; and for this also Grant at once provided. These are the things which the conqueror had done when he came out of the house with unrelaxed countenance, and rode away. As he went, he heard firing from his lines. It was in honor of the news, already spreading. He stopped these salutes at once. "The war is over," he said. "The rebels are our countrymen again."

Thus, when his strength had quelled the four years' storm, did a rainbow rise from his great heart across the heavens of our native land.

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY (1861-1920)

The Precept of Peace

A CERTAIN Sort of voluntary abstraction is the oldest and choicest of social attitudes. In France, where all esthetic discoveries are made, it was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind, brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it; full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly" among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave, but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand, and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the shorter stick of celery, or

"The friends to whom we had no natural right,

The homes that were not destined to be ours,"

it is all one let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the bric-a-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit, is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life," says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act with too jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap only indigestion, and crow'sfoot traceries for their deluded eye-corners.

Now nothing is farther from le saint indifférent than cheap indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness, like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through voli

tion, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a specific act he has no habits. Le saint indifférent is a dramatic wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of easy goodnature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent partizan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros Tyriusque. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat less communicative than

"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height."

Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw, and stretches his legs; then heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelopes him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed Hamlet of this mortal outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear, where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes, which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our indifférent, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero of the habitually