George Eggleston - The Master of Warlock - A Virginia War Story

When the two friends reached the outer gates of Warlock plantation on their way to the Court-house, Marshall, to whose queer ways his friend was thoroughly well used, called a halt.

"Let us dismount," he said, "and consider what we are doing."

When they had seated themselves upon the carpet of pine-needles, the meditative youth resumed:

"Does it occur to you, Baillie," he asked, "that when you and I pass through yonder gate, we shall leave behind us for ever the most enjoyable life that it ever fell to the lot of human beings to lead? Do you realise that we may never either of us come back through that gate again, and that if we do, it will only be to find all things changed? We are at the end of a chapter. The next chapter will be by no means like unto it."

"I confess I don't quite understand," answered the less meditative one.

"Well, this easy-going, delightful Virginian life of ours has no counterpart anywhere on this continent or elsewhere in the world, and we have decided to put an end to it. For this war is going to be a very serious thing to us Virginians. Virginia is destined to be the battle-field. Greater armies than have ever before been dreamed of on this continent are going to trample over her fields, and meet in dreadful conflict on the margins of her watercourses. Her homes are going to be desolated, her fields laid waste, her substance utterly exhausted, and her people reduced to poverty in a cause that is not her own, and in behalf of which she unselfishly risks all for the sake of an abstraction, and in defence of a right on the part of other States which Virginia herself had seen no occasion to assert in her own defence. Whatever else happens in this war, all that is characteristic in Virginian life, all that is peculiar to it, all that lends loveliness to it, must be sacrificed on the altar of duty.

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