Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/452

 446 Southern Historical Society Papers.

looked around with wonder that even they were left ahve. Of the four hundred who started to cHmb the slope more than two hundred fell; some, in the confusion of the night's engagement, had wandered into the enemy's lines ; all of the staff and Murray, the first captain, gone ; Murray dead nearly at the foot of the entrenchments. Such is the simple story that this tablet tells.

" Comrades, we have together shared trials and dangers that knit our hearts as one, by ties the strongest that man can know, and of all the memories that cluster about our hearts there are none that appeal more strongly to our tenderest affections and to our pride than those that are immediately recalled by our ceremonies of to-day, and I cannot but feel and give expression to the feeling that I have been honored far above my deserving in having been selected as the organ of your feelings and affections on an occasion such as this. Conscious of the many obligations under which your unvarying kindness and goodwill laid me when associated together in the honorable career of arms, I rely upon your kindness and forbearance if I have not come up to the full measure of your expectations. In few and sim- ple words I have recalled the story we would not willingly let die. A tongue more eloquent and a heart less full might have done it ampler justice.

"Comrades, we go to our homes when our ceremonies are over conscious of having performed a most sacred duty. In the time to come some one of us may stand under the shadow of this monu- ment to tell of the labor and work of dear companions gone, to those who know of our days of sacrifice and devotion only as matters of old tradition, and the reply may rise to the lips, 'And yet you failed,' and you shall say. ' Not so; not so. Failure is in duty left undone. Obeying the call of sacred obligation, we did our part as best we might, trusting for our justification to the God that ruled our hearts and had our cause in hand. To Him and to His will we bowed.'

"And now. sir, it is my duty and my great pleasure to turn over to the charge of the Association which you represent this memorial of the deeds of the sons of Maryland whose cause was lost in the clash of arms. You will guard it well, not as a tribute to the cause that's dead, but as an added page to the great record you have in charge — a record which belongs to no section and to no time, the joint heritage of the North and of the .South, and of right to be transmitted in all its fullness to the ages yet to come."