Father Ryan was never again to go out from this peaceful harbor into the tumultuous billows of world-life.  He had been there but a short time when his physician told him that he must prepare for death.  “Why,” he said, “I did that long years ago.”  The time of rest for which he had prayed in years gone by was near at hand.

    My feet are wearied and my hands are tired,
      My soul oppressed—­
    And I desire, what I have long desired—­
      Rest—­only rest.

* * * * *

    The burden of my days is hard to bear,
      But God knows best;
    And I have prayed—­but vain has been my prayer
      For rest—­sweet rest.

In his last days his mind was filled with reminiscences of the war and he would arouse the monastery and tell the priests and brothers, “Go out into the city and tell the people that trouble is at hand.  War is coming with pestilence and famine and they must prepare to meet the invader.”

On Thursday of Holy Week, April 22, 1886, the weary life drifted out upon the calm sea of Eternal Peace.

“BACON AND GREENS”

DR. GEORGE WILLIAM BAGBY

We, the general and I, were the first to be informed of the supernal qualities of bacon and greens.  All Virginians were aware of the prime importance of this necessary feature of an Old Dominion dinner, but that “a Virginian could not be a Virginian without bacon and greens” was unknown to us until the discoverer of that ethnological fact.  Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles.  We were the first to see the frost that “lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in the chilly breeze.”

In the early days after the war Dr. Bagby had a pleasant habit of dropping into our rooms at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, and as soon as the ink was dry on that combination of humor and pathos and wisdom to which he gave the classic title of “Bacon and Greens” he brought it and read it to us.  I can still follow the pleasant ramble on which he took us in fancy through a plantation road, the innumerable delights along the way never to be appreciated to their full extent by any but a real Virginian brought up on bacon and greens, and the arrival at the end of the journey, where we were taken possession of as if we “were the Prodigal Son or the last number of the Richmond Enquirer.”  My eyes were the first to fill with tears over the picture of the poor old man at the last, sitting by the dying fire in the empty house, while the storm raged outside.