Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/487

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About this time General Simon Buckner paid a visit to his old classmate and conqueror. "It is a purely personal visit," he said to General Grant. "I wanted you to know that many Confederate officers sympathize with you in your sickness and trouble."

"I appreciate your calling highly," the Northern chieftain wrote in reply. "I have witnessed since my illness just what I have wished to see since the war, harmony—harmony and good will between the sections. … We now look forward to a perpetual peace at home and a national strength which will screen us against any foreign complication. I believe myself that the war was worth all it cost us, fearful as that was. Since it was over I have visited every state in Europe and a number in the East. I know, as I did not before, the value of our institutions."

As General Buckner passed out of the house the reporters fell upon him, eager to know what was said. "I cannot tell you," he said. "The visit was purely personal; and, besides," he added, with eyes dim with tears, "it was too sacred. Without General Grant's consent, I cannot speak."

After reaching New York, General Buckner received a despatch from General Grant permitting the interview to be made public. When it appeared that the interview might add to the harmony and good will between the North and the South, Grant was eager to have it sent far and wide. Throughout all his later life he had had two predominating desires: one, to put down the rebellion; and, when that was done, then his whole heart went out toward the task of reconstructing the nation. And so now, though having gone away into a mountain to die, he still desired that every word of his should make for a united and peaceful nation.

His wish was gratified. The words he wrote went to North and South as messengers of peace. Again he said, "Let us have peace." And, standing there on the high ground between earth and the things beyond the earth, his words had all the force of a command and a benediction.

In ever increasing calm and ever decreasing sensibility to pain, he drifted toward the shadowed world. His introspection increased, and the certainty of his speedy death grew very strong in his own mind. "I have admonitions that the doctors know not of," he wrote slowly upon his tablet; "I think it doubtful that I shall last much longer than the end of the month." Despair had no place in the growing serenity of his manner. There was a lofty courage which laid hold upon great conceptions of human destiny. He subscribed to no creed, but he had an unspeakable faith in the integrity of the universe. He had no map of the unseen land toward which he was marching, but he believed it to be a better land than this, and that light and the guidance of reason would be present there as in the world he was leaving. He did not know, but he had no fear.

His consideration and his instant courtesy never left him. His gratitude for little kindnesses was inexpressibly touching. His physicians could look upon it only with tears.

On the 22d of July he expressed a wish to be in a bed. His bones were intolerably weary of the chair in which he had spent night and day during months of ceaseless suffering. The physicians looked at each other significantly. He was transferred to his bed, and as he stretched out his tired limbs and lay full length at last, he drew a sigh of relief and smiled. He felt the delicious restfulness of the bed as he used to do when a boy after a hard day's work. That he knew it to be his deathbed is certain; but it was none the less grateful because of that—it was the more grateful by reason of that.

"Does it seem good to be in bed?"

"So good. So good," he whispered in reply.

A deep, untroubled sleep fell upon him almost at once, but the physicians read the advance of death in the labored breathing and fluttering pulse. Slowly the blood ceased to warm the body. The lower limbs grew cold as marble, and the breathing grew ever quicker and lighter. The lower cells of the lungs were closing. Life was retreating to the brain.

The family at last were all there. The loyal wife sat often by his side, where she could touch his face and press his hand. His eldest son, erect, calm, and soldierly, scarcely relaxed his painful vigil. It was a long and terrible watch, and when midnight came, it was evident that death was present in the room at last. The great soldier lay in a doze which was the lethargy of dissolution, but still responded to the agonized words of love from his wife and daughter by opening his eyes in a peculiarly clear, wide,