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HISTORY OF THE ORPHAN BRIGADE.

CHAPTER XVIII.

our dead and where they lie.-confederate veteran organizations, their objects, and those now maintained in kentucky.

" How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, "By all their country's wishes bless'd! " When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, " Returns to deck their hallow'd mould, " She there shall dress a sweeter sod "Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.

" By fairy hands their knell is rung; "By forms unseen their dirge is sung; " There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray, "To bless the turf that wraps their clay; "And Freedom shall awhile repair, "To dwell a weeping hermit there! "

It has long been a matter of observation and remark that the Confederate soldiers of Kentucky have a livelier, more enduring, and more loyal feeling of comradeship than is at all apparent in those whose arms were finally triumphant. This is due in part, no doubt, to the enthusiastic temper of Kentuckians, and to that hearty social turn which readily makes friends but by no means so readily loses interest in them and casts them off; but certainly in greater part to the peculiar circumstances of their association in the military service, and to those disasters which " followed fast and followed faster" until the final and irretrievable overthrow of the Confederacy.

In the family that has known misfortune, and across whose threshold has fallen again and again the black shadow of death, bringing bereavements and leaving the memory of delightful life terminated by the agonies of dissolution, there come to the survivors a deeper tenderness and more loving solicitude for each other than is possible to those who live in the sunshine and know little of the defeats and disappointments that sadden if they do not break the spirit. So the thought of the days when these thousands of ardent young Kentuckians marshalled themselves in a cause which to them was as sacred as any that ever led men to array themselves against the perpetration of a great wrong; the ever-insistent and inappeasable ghost of " what might have