It is wrong to talk of Lincoln and a star together⁠—that old rubbed image is a scrap of tinsel, a scrap of dead poetry⁠—it dries up and blows away when it touches a man. And yet Lincoln had a star, if you will have it so⁠—and was haunted by a prairie-star.

Down in the South another man, most unlike him but as steadfast, is haunted by another star that has little to do with tinsel, and the man they call “Evacuation” Lee begins to grow taller and to cast a longer shadow.