Before the Dawn: A Story of the Fall of Richmond

It was announced that the presidential reception on the following evening would be of special dignity and splendour, and it was thought the part of duty by all who were of conse...

The deep snow was followed by the beginning of a thaw, interrupted by a sudden and very sharp cold spell, when the mercury went down to zero and the water from the melting snow...

Walking abroad at noontime next day, Prescott saw Helen Harley coming toward Capitol Square, stepping lightly through the snow, a type of youthful freshness and vigour. The red...

Helen Harley saw the sun rise in a shower of red and gold on a May morning, and then begin a slow and quiet sail up a sky of silky blue. It even touched the gloomy shades of the...

The wounded and those who watched them in the old house learned a little of the race through the darkness. The change of the field of combat, the struggle for Spottsylvania and...

Prescott was a staff officer and a captain, bearing a report from the Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia to the President of the Confederacy; but having been told in adv...

Prescott rose the next morning with an uneasy weight upon his mind--the thought of the prisoner whom he had taken the night before. He was unable to imagine how a woman of her m...

Then they were silent again. Night, smoky, cloudy and dark, thick with vapours and mists, and ashes and odours that repelled, was coming down upon the Wilderness. Afar in the ea...

Two days passed, and neither any word nor his gold having come from the Grayson cottage, Prescott began to feel bold again and decided that he would call there openly and talk o...

Prescott now resolved, whatever happened, to make another attempt at the escape of Lucia Catherwood. Threats of danger, unspoken, perhaps, but to his mind not the less formidabl...

A tall, well-favoured youth, coming from the farther South, boarded the train for Richmond one raw, gusty morning. He carried his left arm stiffly, his face was thin and brown,...

A large man sat in the shadow of a little rain-washed tent one golden May morning and gazed with unseeing eyes at the rich spectacle spread before him by Nature. The sky was a d...

Leaves of yellow and red and brown were falling, and the wind that came up the valley played on the boughs like a bow on the strings of a violin. The mountain ridges piled again...

It was about ten by the watch, and a very cold, dark and quiet night, when Prescott reached the Grayson cottage and paused a moment at the gate, the dry snow crumbling under his...

The old house in the woods which still lay within the Confederate lines became a hospital before morning, and when General Wood turned away from it he beheld a woman staggering...

The silver lining which the reception to General Morgan put in the cloud always hanging over Richmond lasted until the next day, when the content of the capital was rudely shatt...

Prescott at three o'clock the following afternoon knocked on the door of Mr. Sefton's private office and the response "Come in!" was like his knock, crisp and decisive. Prescott...

Two men sat early the next morning in a tent with a pot of coffee and a breakfast of strips of bacon between them. One was elderly, calm and grave, and his face was known well t...

Nearly all the guests left the Markham house at the same time and stood for a few moments in the white Greek portico, bidding one another good-night. It seemed to Prescott that...

The retreating brigade, the river behind it and the pursuit seemingly lost on the farther shore, passed on in the golden sunshine of the morning through, a country of gentle hil...

Prescott was awakened from his sleep by his mother, who came to him in suppressed anxiety, telling him that a soldier was in the outer room with a message demanding his instant...

The chief visitor to the little house in the cross street two days later was James Sefton, the agile Secretary, who was in a fine humour with himself and did not take the troubl...

It had been a night of labour and anxiety for Prescott. In the turmoil of the flight he had been forgotten by the President and all others who had the power to give him orders,...

Two long lines of earthworks faced each other across a sodden field; overhead a chilly sky let fall a chilly rain; behind the low ridges of earth two armies faced each other, an...

Prescott has never forgotten that night, the long ride, the relief from danger, the silent woman by his side; and there was in all a keen enjoyment, of a kind deeper and more ho...

It was a bleak, cold night and Prescott's feelings were of the same tenor. The distant buildings seemed to swim in a raw mist and pedestrians fled from the streets. Prescott wal...

"It is now the gossip in Richmond," said Mrs. Prescott to her son as they sat together before the fire a day or two later, "that General Wood makes an unusually long stay here f...

It was a modest house to which Prescott turned his steps, built two stories in height, of red brick, with green shutters over the windows, and in front a little brick-floored po...

a spy. She was there in the President's office that day, and she might have been one had she yielded to her impulse, but she put the temptation aside. She has told you this and...

The desultory firing troubled the ears of Talbot as he trod to and fro on his self-imposed task, as he could not see the use of it. The day for fighting and the night for sleep...

"There is no doubt of it," he replied, but there was such a lack of enthusiasm in his own voice that his mother looked quickly at him. Helen did not notice. She was happy to hea...

Prescott had been at home some months. Johnston's army, too, had surrendered. Everywhere the soldiers of the South, seeing that further resistance would be criminal, laid down t...

There is in Virginia a grim and sterile region the name of which no American ever hears without a shudder. When you speak to him of the Wilderness, the phantom armies rise befor...