Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 24.djvu/311

Rh grasped tighter as on, on they rush. God have mercy on them. The deadly canister sweeps through their rank, shorter and shorter grows their line. Heaven pity their poor mothers, whose prayers are even now rising to heaven for their darlings' safety. Oh! that some pitying hand would stretch out to stay them, but on, on, on, they march right into the jaws of the black monsters.

Now they enter the smoke, they disappear. The thunder of six great guns is silenced. A juvenile shout is heard, and the survivors of that little band of heroes have captured the battery. Scarcely have we realized that they are victors until we find that they man the captured guns and turn them down our lines.

When the death of the venerable ex-Senator George W. Jones, of Iowa, was announced recently, the misstatement went with it that ex-Senator Bradbury, of Maine, was the only living member of the senatorial group that was in office previous to the outbreak of the rebellion. This was a curious mistake, in view of the fact that ex-Senator Harlan, of Iowa, is very much alive, that he was not only prominent as a senator and a member of the first Cabinet of Lincoln, but also that he was an eager candidate for the nomination for Governor of Iowa last year, and that only a short time before the death of Jones he had made a stirring speech to the old soldiers on Memorial Day.

Less curious, perhaps, yet still remarkable, was the fact that almost no commentator upon the death of Jones and the ante-war senatorial group remembered that the last of the Southern Senators to leave the Senate on account of the secession of States is still in the land of the living.