the place of meeting. As the bugle sounded the summons to mount, a breathless messenger appeared on a horse flecked with foam. Mrs. Jackson had died of heart disease the evening before. [Pg 102] The festival was changed to a funeral, and the trumpets and drums that were to have sounded salute were muffled in black. All decorations were taken down, and the church bells tolled mournfully. The grief of the people was beyond speech. Each one felt a personal loss. At the home the blow was terrible. The lover-husband would not leave his [Pg 103]wife. In those bitter hours the highest gift of his countrymen was an empty triumph, for his soul was wrecked with the greatness of his loss. [Pg 103] When she was buried at the foot of a slope in the garden of “The Hermitage,” his bereavement came home to him with crushing strength. Back of the open grave stood a great throng of people, waiting in the wintry wind. The sun shone brightly on the snow, but “The Hermitage” was desolate, for its light and laughter and love were gone. The casket was carried down the slope, and a long way behind it came the General, slowly and almost helpless, between two of his friends. The people of Nashville had made ready to greet him with the blare of bugles, waving flags, the clash of cymbals, and resounding cheers. It was for the President-elect—the hero of the war. The throng that stood behind the open grave greeted him with sobs and tears—not the President-elect, but the man bowed by his sixty years, bareheaded, with his [Pg 104]gray hair rumpled in the wind, staggering toward them in the throes of his bitterest grief. [Pg 104] In that one night he had grown old. He looked like a man stricken beyond all hope. When his old friends gathered around him with the tears streaming down their cheeks, wringing his hand in silent sympathy, he could make no response. He was never the same again, though his strength of will and his desperate courage fought with this infinite pain. For the rest of his life he lived as she would have had him live—guided his actions by the thought of what his wife, if living, would have had him do—loving her still, with the love that passeth all understanding. He declined the sarcophagus fit for an emperor, that he might be buried like a simple citizen, in the garden by her side.
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