1. I.
In carelessly looking over an old portfolio yesterday—October
31, 1866—I found among other curious records of the war a
rude, discoloured scrap of paper, written in pencil, and bearing
date October 31, 1862.
Four years, day for day, had passed, since those pencil marks
were traced. Four years! not a long time, you may say, in the
life of man. But longest of long years—most snail-like in their
movement—most terrible for that delay which makes the stoutest
heart grow sick, were those four twelvemonths between October,
1862, and October, 1866. The larger portion of the period
was spent in hoping—the rest of it in despairing.
But I wander from the subject of this sketch. The paper
found in my portfolio contained the following words, written, as
I have said, in pencil:
“Mountsville, October 31, 1862.
“I hereby bind myself, on my word of honour, not to take up
arms against the Confederate States, or in any manner give aid
and comfort to the Federal cause, until I am regularly exchanged.
I read this paper, and then went back and read it over again.
A careless observer would have seen in it only a simple and
very hastily written parole. Read at one instant, it would have
been forgotten in the next—a veritable leaf of autumn, dry and
worthless.
For me it contained much more than was written on it. I did
not throw it aside. I read it over a third time, and it made a
dolorous impression on my heart. For that paper, written by
myself four years ago, and signed by a dying man whose hand
staggered as it traversed the sheet, leaving the name of the writer
almost illegible, his full official rank unrecorded—that paper
brought back to my memory a day near Aldie, when it was my
sorrowful duty to parole a brother human being in articulo
mortis.
“A brother human being, do you say? He was only a
Yankee!” some one may object. No—he was my brother,
and yours, reader, whether you wore blue or gray. Did you
wear the gray, then? So did I. Did you hate the invaders of
Virginia? So did I. You may have been able to see this
enemy die in agony, and not pity him. I was not. And the
proof is, that the sight of the paper which his faint hand touched
as he drew his last breath, has struck me wofully, and blotted
out a part of the autumn sunshine yonder on the mountains.
I have nothing to reproach myself with—the reader shall
judge of that—but this poor rough scrap of paper with its
tremulous signature moves me all the same.
