THE CLOSING DAYS Within the Southern lines and just beyond the range of the Northern guns, two men sat playing chess.

They were elderly, gray and thin, but never had the faces of the two colonels been more defiant.

With the Confederacy crumbling about them it was characteristic of both that they should show no despair, if in truth they felt it.

Their confidence in Lee was sublime.

He could still move mountains, although he had no tools with which to move them, and the younger officers, mere boys many of them, would come back to them again and again for encouragement.