Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his
commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer
McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among
the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the
hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him
to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without
bitterness.

Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the
crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost
cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley,
facing the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled,
as only a brave man might.

His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot
of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare
sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old
homestead late one evening, and that the next day he was making ready
for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only
neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: sturdy, tenacious,
dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events,
following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.

Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine years
after the great struggle had passed into history, Caleb, the soldier,
was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the
wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands of
his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel swinging
rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.