Lanier reached Macon March 15, after a long and painful journey
through the Carolinas. Immediately upon his arrival, losing the stimulus
which had kept him going so long, he fell dangerously ill,
and remained so for nearly two months. Early in May,
just as he was convalescing, General Wilson captured Macon,
and Jefferson Davis and Clement C. Clay were brought to the Lanier House,
whence they were to start on their way as prisoners to Fortress Monroe.
Clifford Lanier reached home May 19. He had, after the blockade was closed
at Wilmington, gone to Cuba. From there he sailed to Galveston
and walked thence to Macon. He arrived just in time to see his mother,
who a few days after died of consumption. She had kept herself
alive for months by "a strong conviction, which she expressed again and again,
that God would bring both her boys to her before she died." Sidney spent
the summer months with his father and his sister, ministering to them
in their sorrow. In September he began to tutor on a large plantation
nine miles from Macon. With thirty classes a day and failing health,
he whose brain was "fairly teeming with beautiful things"
was shut up to the horrible monotony of the "tear and tret" of the schoolroom.
He spent the winter at Point Clear on Mobile Bay, where he was
greatly invigorated by the sea breezes and the air of the pine forests.

After these months of sorrow and struggle he settled in Montgomery, Ala.,
as clerk in the Exchange Hotel, the property of his grandfather
and his uncles. His first feeling as he faces the new conditions
which he is trying to explain to Northrup, his Northern friend,
is one of bewilderment, -- the immense distance between
the beginning and the end of the war: --