jJ VERS TY OF CA RIVERSIDE 
 
 3 1210016569582 
 
 A VIRGINIAN 
 VILLAGE 
 
 E. S. NADAL
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 A VIRGINIAN VILLAGE
 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LOOTED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 A VIRGINIAN VILLAGE 
 
 AND OTHER PAPERS 
 
 TOGETHER WITH SOME AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 
 NOTES 
 
 E^S^NADAL 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1917 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 T>$ ^ 
 
 A/SLl/57 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917 
 
 BY E. S. NADAL 
 
 Set up and printed. Published February, IQI?
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES i 
 
 A VIRGINIAN MOUNTAIN VILLAGE 68 
 
 SOUTHERN LITERATURE 88 
 
 A HORSE-FAIR PILGRIMAGE 100 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF LINCOLN 120 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF LOWELL 148 
 
 LONDON RECOLLECTIONS OF LOWELL .... 162 
 
 A VIRGINIAN JOURNEY 184 
 
 CONTRASTS OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCENERY . 212 
 
 CUMBERLAND GAP 218 
 
 TYPES OF KENTUCKY SADDLE-HORSES .... 220 
 
 TEXAN SCENERY 234 
 
 LINCOLN AND STANTON 246 
 
 WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 251 
 
 LINCOLN AND FORESIGHT 259 
 
 VIRGINIA WOMEN 264
 
 A VIRGINIAN VILLAGE
 
 The "Autobiographical Notes" in this 
 volume are printed for the first time. The 
 other papers have appeared in periodicals. 
 The author wishes to thank the editors of 
 Scribner's, the Century, Harper's and the 
 Nineteenth Century Magazines, and of The 
 Outlook, The Independent, and the New York 
 Evening Post, for permission to reprint them 
 here.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES 
 
 MY publishers think that I should preface this 
 book with some account of myself. They 
 say the book represents me as being in so many 
 places and doing so many things that the effect upon 
 the reader is confusing. I once many years ago 
 happened to open a copy of Puck and saw upon the 
 editorial page a poem upon myself. My name was 
 at the head of it. It was written by the editor, Mr. 
 H. C. Bunner. The first three stanzas were upon 
 some literary efforts of mine which had not met with 
 the poet's approval. The concluding couplet was 
 as follows: 
 
 Tell us, tell us, tell us, pray, 
 Who is Nadal any way? 
 
 It is this inquiry which my publishers desire that I 
 should answer, and they have requested that the 
 reply should take the form of a brief autobiographical 
 sketch. 
 
 I was born in Greenbrier County, Virginia. It was 
 Virginia when I was born there. It is West Virginia 
 now and has been since the establishment of that 
 state, which was done during the Civil War. It is 
 on the eastern boundary line of the state and is 
 much more like old Virginia than West Virginia. 
 In population it is just like the Valley of Virginia, 
 from which it was largely peopled, its population 
 being chiefly Scotch-Irish. My father was the min-
 
 2 A Virginian Village 
 
 ister of the Methodist Church in Lewisburg, the 
 county town, when I was born there. He had 
 there married my mother, who was a native of the 
 county. A Methodist minister in those days re 
 mained only two years at each church, which ac 
 counts for the wandering life I led as a boy. It thus 
 happened that I had lived in Virginia, in Baltimore, 
 and in Pennsylvania, up to the time I was eleven 
 years old. My father then became a professor of 
 English Literature in a college at Greencastle in 
 Indiana, which is now De Pauw University, where 
 he remained three years, until I was fourteen. From 
 that time he preached in Virginia, Washington and 
 Brooklyn. All this was very bad for my schooling. I 
 was in the preparatory school of De Pauw University, 
 and was afterwards at Roanoke College, Salem, 
 Virginia, and at Columbian College, Washington. 
 I was a Freshman and Sophomore at Columbia 
 College, New York, and a Junior and Senior at Yale, 
 where I was graduated in 1864. This wandering 
 life seemed to suit my father, if it was not good for 
 me. I have heard him say that there was a little 
 Freshman in one of his classes at De Pauw University, 
 who once read a composition on "The Elsewhere." 
 The boy's idea was that, wherever you were, you 
 always wanted to be somewhere else. That com 
 position made a great impression on my father. I 
 have often heard him speak of it. He was of a restless 
 and roving disposition himself, which I have in some 
 degree inherited. 
 
 The year after leaving Yale I taught in a co 
 educational institution on the Susquehanna. After 
 that I was a teacher or a government clerk until 
 1870, when I was appointed a secretary of lega-
 
 Autobiographical Notes 3 
 
 tion in London. I was there a year and a half and 
 then returned to this country and lived in New 
 York, where I was a writer and journalist until 1877, 
 when I was again appointed to the London legation. 
 I remained at the London legation until 1884 and 
 have since lived in New York, where I have been 
 a writer and journalist. For twenty years past, 
 however, my chief occupation has been with saddle 
 and harness horses. 
 
 My grandfather came to this country from the 
 south of France when he was a boy. Of his people 
 there I know very little. I have indeed seen letters 
 to him from a sister of his, written when she was an 
 elderly woman in which she says: "Do you remember 
 that when you ran away and bade me 'good-bye' at 
 the end of the garden, you promised that, when you 
 came back, you would bring me some of those little 
 biscuits?" (describing the biscuits). She adds: "I 
 have waited forty years for those biscuits." My 
 father was half a Frenchman by blood, and I think 
 a good deal more than that in mind and character, 
 and I believe he has transmitted his Gallic traits to his 
 children. I never read a French book but I feel that 
 I belong to that country. My father had the strong 
 French social characteristics, and I feel them in me. 
 I have the consciousness of having come from people, 
 who went about drinking sugar and water with one 
 another, and whom you could not have kept at home 
 with a ball and chain. Like every Frenchman, 
 my father was a passionate politician. He was be 
 fore the war an old line Whig, a devoted admirer of 
 Clay and Webster, whose names he always spoke 
 with the prefix "Mr." One of my early impressions 
 is of his walking up and down the floor of his study
 
 4 A Virginian Village 
 
 weeping at the time of the death of Henry Clay. 
 No statesman of that day was so loved as Clay. 
 I daresay my father thought Webster the greater 
 intellect, but he had more affection for Clay. No 
 one else quite typified the idea of the Union as Clay 
 did, not even Webster or Jackson. Clay was a bor 
 der statesman, and I doubt if any other men in the 
 country loved the Union quite as the border-state 
 men did. That may seem a queer opinion in view of 
 the fact that many of these men became secessionists 
 during the Civil War, but I believe it to be true. 
 My father told me that he attended the debates in 
 the Senate in 1851 on the compromise measures. 
 His expression about Webster, when speaking, was 
 that he "floundered about like a great mass of mind." 
 He told me of hearing the following from Clay in 
 the Senate. Clay had said that Mason, of Virginia, 
 afterwards Confederate Agent in London, had been 
 conferring with certain Senators with intentions un 
 friendly to the Union. Mason got up and said it 
 was true that he had been in consultation with cer 
 tain gentlemen with a view to defending "the dignity, 
 the honor and the welfare of the South." "And I 
 too," said Clay, "have been in consultation with 
 certain gentlemen with the view to defending the 
 dignity, the honor and the welfare, not of the South, 
 nor of any other portion of the country, but of the 
 whole Union" words spoken by the old patriot 
 with a passion that went to everybody's finger tips. 
 My father was never happier than when he could 
 make Thanksgiving or some other event an occasion 
 or an excuse for a political sermon. I saw lately one 
 of these sermons advertised to be sold at an auction 
 at Anderson's in Fortieth Street, New York, and I
 
 Autobiographical Notes 5 
 
 went to the sale and bid on it and had to pay eight 
 dollars to get it, and I know it was not run up on me. 
 It was delivered in Washington not long after the war 
 and was a statement of a carefully thought out and 
 vigorously uttered plan of Reconstruction. My 
 father would have been greatly surprised to learn 
 that one of his little paper-covered sermons should 
 bring eight dollars. 
 
 Of the many things I have read about Lincoln, 
 I don't think anything had quite such natural ten 
 derness as the sermon which he preached about him 
 in Washington, the Sunday after Lincoln's death. 
 He had always been a great believer in him. He had 
 had no personal acquaintance with him until the last 
 year of the war, but from the time Lincoln became 
 President, his name was never mentioned in our 
 house but with the sincerest respect and with a de 
 gree of affection. Certain perfectly honest people had 
 been calling him "a fool brayed in the mortar," and 
 "a first-rate, second-rate man," and there were other 
 better mannered persons of the superior-shallow kind 
 who, without using such strong language, had a 
 condescending way of speaking of him. But such 
 expressions did not in the least affect our way of 
 regarding him. 
 
 About a year before Lincoln's death, my father 
 became the clergyman of a church in Washington 
 and while there got to know Lincoln well and became 
 very fond of him. He preached his sermon about 
 him the Sunday morning following his death, which 
 had taken place on the previous Friday night. On ( 
 that Sunday morning I suppose there was scarcely 
 a pulpit throughout the whole North in which the 
 event was not at any rate spoken of. But my father
 
 6 A Virginian Village 
 
 had been his personal friend. The body of Lincoln 
 was lying only a short distance from where my father 
 was speaking. Some violence of feeling and of lan 
 guage under the circumstances might have been 
 expected from him, but this does not appear in the 
 sermon. There are indeed such expressions as the 
 following: That when he first heard the news, his 
 feeling was "that he had rather the swift bullet of 
 the battlefield had struck down his first born," 
 and there seems to be an involuntary cry of pain in 
 this exclamation concerning the assassin: "I think 
 of him only as some venomous insect that has stung 
 the noble President to death." But the sermon is 
 in the main in a quiet tone of deep and tender feeling 
 and is a sober consideraton of the effect of Lincoln's 
 death upon the task of restoration and pacification. 
 
 As we were two years at each church, my father's 
 sermons were preached over again pretty often, and 
 we of the family got to know these sermons well. 
 I remember particularly one on the Transfiguration, 
 which was very popular. Christ took with him into 
 the Mountain Peter and James and John. "John 
 was taken," said my father, "because he was the 
 beloved disciple." Peter was selected because he was 
 one of those vigorous characters who, whether for 
 good or evil, are always to the fore in human affairs. 
 But why should James have been selected? My 
 father could think of but one reason for the selection 
 of James, which was that he was John's brother. 
 "And my brethren," he would continue, "if there 
 be nothing strained or fanciful in this suggestion, 
 there is to my mind something infinitely touching 
 in this recognition of a human tie by the incarnate 
 God." He would then have something to say upon
 
 Autobiographical Notes 7 
 
 the fraternal relationship, and he would mention a 
 brother of his own, between whom and himself there 
 was a strong affection. His sermons were perhaps 
 rather more personal than would suit the classical 
 or conventional idea of such compositions. In this 
 connection he would quote the well-known lines 
 of Goldsmith beginning, "Remote, unfriended," giv 
 ing with especial feeling the concluding couplet: 
 
 Still to my brother turns with ceaseless pain, 
 And drags at each remove a lengthening chain. 
 
 He had a kind of spirituality and simplicity that was 
 Latin rather than Saxon. 
 
 My father was for a year the minister of a Presby 
 terian church in Baltimore, during the illness of the 
 regular minister, Dr. Duncan, a preacher noted for 
 his eloquence. The people who had the pew in 
 front of us were the Jerome Bonapartes. Jerome 
 Bonaparte was the nephew of the great Napoleon, 
 being the son of his brother Jerome, the King of 
 Westphalia, who had married Miss Patterson. His 
 resemblance to pictures of the great Napoleon, 
 which I daresay he cultivated, was astonishing. 
 This church had separated from the Presbyterian 
 body on some point of doctrine. There had been a 
 contest for the possession of the church between the 
 majority of the congregation, who were supporters 
 of Dr. Duncan, and the minority who opposed him, 
 and the dispute between the two parties got into the 
 courts. William Wirt of Baltimore, one of the 
 greatest advocates and orators in the country, de 
 fended Dr. Duncan. Wirt, a man of imposing 
 presence, with a fine voice, in his argument on be 
 half of the minister, with an affectionate gesture of
 
 8 A Virginian Village 
 
 his hand in the direction of Dr. Duncan, repeated 
 to the jury the lines in Macbeth concerning another 
 Duncan, Duncan the Meek. 
 
 Besides, this Duncan 
 
 Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been 
 So clear in his great office, that his virtues 
 Will plead like angels, trumpet tongued, against 
 The deep damnation of his taking off. 
 
 The verdict was for Dr. Duncan. 
 
 My father went to Europe in 1853 with T. Bu 
 chanan Read, a poet and painter. Read was a good 
 poet, but I fancy not so good a painter. He was the 
 author of "The Wagoner of the Alleghanies," a poem 
 about the Susquehanna, of which I remember only 
 these words. Some scene is described as "bound 
 afar by billowy mountains rolling in the blue." I sup 
 pose Read may be considered the poet of the Sus 
 quehanna. Campbell, of course, never saw it. He 
 wrote also a beautiful poem "Drifting" and one 
 better known, but I think not so good, "Sheridan's 
 Ride." They had rooms in Vigo Street, London, 
 which I tried afterwards unsuccessfully to identify. 
 Read was an inveterate punster. He was a friend 
 of Rossetti, then a young man quite unknown to 
 fame. One day Rossetti was at their lodgings, and 
 he, Read and my father were having some kind of 
 hot drink together, probably hot Scotch. Rossetti's 
 name was Gabriel, his full name Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti. Rossetti complained that his drink was 
 too hot, when Read said "Gabriel, blow your horn." 
 Was that actually said at the moment, or did Read 
 afterwards tell my father that he had thought of 
 saying it and would have said it, but refrained from
 
 Autobiographical Notes 9 
 
 doing so because he feared that my father, as a 
 clergyman, might consider the allusion profane? In 
 the latter case, I fear we cannot credit him with the 
 pun as an impromptu. It was altogether too good. 
 If he had really thought of it at the moment, he 
 would probably have risked the chances of my 
 father's displeasure. 
 
 My father had a great gift for speaking to chil 
 dren. He made us a speech in the Sunday School, 
 when he came back from his travels in Europe. I 
 remember especially what he told us about the boys 
 he had seen fishing in the London parks. My 
 father had always been a fisherman and gave up 
 fishing only toward the end of his life, because he 
 thought it cruel. The Baltimore boys all fished. 
 There was not a boy in the Sunday School, who did 
 not know that any rainy afternoon of a spring day, 
 in any of the waters running into the Chesapeake, 
 you could pull up a good string of sun-fish, perch 
 and cat-fish, in half an hour. The little red or 
 bright blue corks were always bobbing. Accord 
 ingly they were much surprised by what my father 
 told them about the luck of the boys who fished in 
 the London parks. He said he had never seen a boy 
 in London catch anything, and he excited the amuse 
 ment and the derision of his juvenile audience by de 
 claring that a London boy was very proud indeed, 
 when he went home after a day's fishing, to be able 
 to report "not a decided bite, but even a glorious 
 nibble." 
 
 The children of a minister no doubt receive from 
 people more kindness than most other people's 
 children get. There were a number of people who 
 were very kind to us when we were children. I am
 
 io A Virginian Village 
 
 now thinking of the four or five years we lived in 
 Baltimore. Among them was a Mrs. Jarrett who 
 rather oddly, for such a good Methodist woman, was 
 the mother of the Jarrett, a well-known theatrical 
 manager of forty years ago, whom I knew. Mrs. 
 Jarrett's husband had a store in Baltimore Street. 
 The Jarretts lived over this store, but the rooms 
 which I remember best, and in which they chiefly 
 lived, were back of the store. You could get into 
 them from the store, and they opened on a back 
 yard, where I used to play. These living rooms on 
 the ground floor I remember as the home of kind 
 ness. Mrs. Jarrett was a large and rather stout 
 woman, and she had a face of infinite kindness and 
 friendliness. Her large, round countenance, upon 
 which there was a pair of spectacles, looked like a 
 deep dish apple pie and had a promise of good things 
 to eat. She gave us sponge cake. Mrs. Jarrett 
 had a wonderfully clever green parrot, upon which 
 she bestowed a good deal of that affection of which 
 she had so much to give away. Just behind Mrs. 
 Jarrett's back yard, and, as I remember it, about two 
 hundred yards away, was a round brick shot tower 
 of infinite height, higher, I should say, than the 
 Tower of Babel. Everyone remembers the disposi 
 tion of childhood to make pictures of everything. 
 When I read or heard read in Matthew that the 
 Devil had taken Christ up to a "pinnacle," where 
 else, I thought, could he have taken him but to the 
 top of that shot tower? Nor had I any doubt that 
 when the colloquy recorded in the scriptures took 
 place between these two great characters in the his 
 tory of our Universe, they were looking over the 
 battlements of the old Baltimore Shot Tower, and
 
 Autobiographical Notes 1 1 
 
 down upon Mrs. Jarrett's back yard and her green 
 pollparrot and her sponge cake. 
 
 For two years I was sent to a school where there 
 were about a hundred girls and I was the only boy. 
 It was partly a boarding school, and the boarders 
 came in a procession to our church on Sunday morn 
 ings. I remember the first time my mother took me 
 to see the master of this school. He asked me what 
 the weather was like at the North Pole. I said " Very 
 cold." And what was it like at the South Pole? I 
 said "Very hot." I can remember perfectly well the 
 laugh that passed at this between the schoolmaster 
 and my mother, an extremely pretty young woman 
 of about twenty-eight. I should think few children 
 of seven years old would be so ignorant as that. 
 But I don't think I ever had a very good head for 
 science. I came across lately a letter written by my 
 father somewhere about that time to my mother. 
 He was in Baltimore and I was with my mother in 
 Virginia. He tells her that he has received a letter 
 from me, in which I told him that I had just seen for 
 the first time the egg of a goose and that I had de 
 scribed it as "of a greenish color and about the size 
 of a crocodile's egg," my father much amused at 
 such parade of erudition and such great familiarity 
 with crocodiles' eggs. I seem not to have many 
 recollections of that school. I recall this incident, 
 however. It was at recess and the hundred girls were 
 down in the garden, when it occurred to me that I 
 could produce a sensation by sitting on the sill of a 
 window on the top story (the fourth, or fifth) of 
 the house, with my legs hanging out. In an instant 
 all of the hundred girls were in a great state of ex 
 citement and were calling frantically to the teachers
 
 12 A Virginian Village 
 
 on the top floor to take me in. A tall blond young 
 woman whom I thought handsome, one of the 
 teachers, came and pulled me in and led me away, 
 giving me at the same time, Oh! unspeakable in 
 dignity! a spank with her open hand on the seat 
 of my trousers. I thought a great deal of my dignity; 
 I would do such things as this, and yet would be 
 greatly offended when I was treated as any other 
 child would have been for similar offenses. 
 
 Children have a keener sense of dignity than is 
 commonly supposed, of which fact the following is 
 an illustration. My father had a great friend, a 
 much loved and respected citizen of Baltimore, Mr. 
 Charles R. Coleman, after whom my brother Charles 
 is named, who lived in a part of Baltimore a good way 
 from where we lived at this time. My father was a 
 man of strong and tenacious friendships; "Charley 
 Coleman" was one of his religions. I often went to 
 stay with the Colemans. I had never been allowed 
 to go there alone, but was always taken by the 
 Colemans or someone of our family, or by a servant. 
 One evening when I was staying at the Colemans, 
 the family wished to go to a prayer meeting, and I 
 had to be disposed of in some way. Accordingly Mrs. 
 Coleman wanted to put me to bed. Now at home I 
 was in the habit of being put to bed about dark, and, 
 though I hated it, still I supposed it was part of the 
 necessary order of things and acquiesced, in it. But 
 when I went off to pay a visit, I thought I should be 
 allowed to sit up. Accordingly I made as much 
 resistance to Mrs. Coleman's proposition as I was 
 capable of. But she carried me upstairs and was 
 proceeding to undress me when, in order to avoid 
 the humiliation of being undressed, I consented to
 
 Autobiographical Notes 13 
 
 undress myself, and to get into bed. A daring idea 
 had occurred to me, which was to get up and to find 
 my way across Baltimore to our house as soon as the 
 Colemans had gone to the prayer meeting. I was in 
 a large four-posted bed in the big back room on the 
 second floor. I lay there, waiting to hear the front 
 door close, when suddenly I opened my eyes, and it 
 was about half past six in the morning, the room full 
 of the bright sunshine of a summer morning. I had 
 had that great felicity of childhood, eleven hours of 
 solid dreamless sleep. My fell purpose immediately 
 returned to my mind and I got up and dressed myself 
 and crept downstairs and opened the front door. 
 I was rather disconcerted to find a maid servant 
 washing off the front pavement and was afraid she 
 might read the purpose I had in mind. So I gave her 
 a wide berth and, when I reached the other side of the 
 street, from which point of vantage I knew that 
 nothing in petticoats could catch me, for I was a 
 good runner, I explained to her my intention and 
 started for home. They were at breakfast when I 
 arrived home and I was at once a great hero. In 
 the course of the morning the Colemans sent over to 
 see if I had arrived. In the evening they came to 
 see us. I had been put to bed, but I could hear their 
 talk from my bedroom, as the doors of the house were 
 open. It is well over sixty years since that night, 
 but I can hear the laughter of those people as if it 
 were yesterday. No, not as if it were yesterday; 
 the sounds rather murmur faintly in some silent 
 medium that is very far away. 
 
 Most little boys like to show off, especially before 
 girls. Not long ago I met in the billiard room of 
 the Century Club a man from Baltimore named
 
 14 A Virginian Village 
 
 James Reynolds. I asked him if he were not the 
 Jim Reynolds I used to go to school with in Balti 
 more. I found that he was. He remembered me and 
 said, "You were a bad boy," which I don't think 
 I was at all. I at once recalled an incident about 
 Jim Reynolds. The school was kept by a Mrs. 
 Rozzell, the widow of a Methodist minister, who 
 used to whip us on the hand, not very hard, with a 
 razor strop, which had, I suppose, been the property 
 of her deceased husband. Mrs. RozzelPs sister, Miss 
 Becky Bosley, assisted her with the school. I used 
 to think that Miss Becky Bosley was handsome. 
 She sometimes wore what was called a "sham," 
 i. e., something like a man's shirt front. One morn 
 ing I had a quarrel with Jim Reynolds, who sat next 
 to me, and I told him that I was going to have it 
 out with him after school. I was nine years old at 
 the time. I was not a quarrelsome boy, nor fond of 
 fighting, and not at all likely to attack anybody I 
 thought could whip me. When afternoon school 
 was out, I saw Jim Reynolds on the front door of his 
 house, which was near the school. At the same 
 moment there was standing at the top of the steps 
 of a high stoop house nearby, a girl perhaps a year 
 older than I was, of whom I was somewhat enamored, 
 who also went to Mrs. Rozzell's school. She was 
 rather tall and large for her age, and she had a great 
 profusion of long dark curls which came down her 
 back. She wore "paddies," such as my sister wore, 
 which were linen coverings for the legs. They were 
 much pleated and had ruffles at the end, which came 
 down over the ankles. When I caught sight of this 
 girl and reflected that she would be looking on, I 
 was fired with the ambition to attack Jim Reynolds,
 
 Autobiographical Notes 15 
 
 which I thought I could safely do. It was a case of 
 Helen standing on the Wall. I was holding Jim 
 Reynolds against the front door of his house and 
 pummeling him, when his mother, hearing the noise, 
 came to the door and opened it, with the result that 
 we fell into the hall at her feet, with me on top. 
 She uttered a cry of horror, raising her hands in 
 consternation, as if I were the greatest malefactor 
 since Cain, which no doubt at the moment she 
 thought I was, and I thought so too. I don't think 
 I scored in the least with the little girl, whose counte 
 nance wore a scornful expression, which plainly 
 showed what she thought of such silliness and vul 
 garity. 
 
 The following is an illustration of the way in which 
 a child's mind works. "Bleak House" was then 
 coming out in "Harper's Magazine" and my father 
 and mother were in the habit of speaking of me as 
 "Mr. Guppy," because I was thought to look like 
 Mr. Guppy in the illustrations of that novel. I 
 didn't know who Mr. Guppy was, but I believed him 
 to be the author of McGuffey's "Second Reader." 
 
 My publishers have asked me to tell the reader 
 how I came to be interested in horses. It is with 
 me, as I have no doubt it is with everybody who 
 really likes horses; I was born with a taste for them. 
 Until I first began to look at a girl, I never saw any 
 thing but a horse. The horseman is born, not made, 
 or rather he is both born and made. I came on my 
 mother's side from people who made their living by 
 raising horses and cattle. I never had anything to 
 do with horses until I was six years old. Although 
 born in Greenbrier, I was not there to stay for any 
 length of time until I was six years old. The earliest
 
 1 6 A Virginian Village 
 
 equine impression of which I have any recollection 
 dates from the time I was about three years old. It 
 was that of the head of a horse looking over the fence 
 of a yard in Baltimore near our house. I thought 
 it pleasant that a horse should be in a yard of the 
 same size as that I played in. I became much in 
 terested in horses when we went to live in Carlisle, 
 Penna., when I was four years old. My father was 
 the minister of the Methodist Church there, and 
 was also chaplain of Dickinson College, which is in 
 that town. There was a U. S. barracks there in 
 that day. The well-known Indian school was not 
 there then. The Commander of the barracks was 
 Colonel May, who had led a celebrated Cavalry 
 charge at the battle of Resaca de La Palma during 
 the Mexican war. He is the "dashing May" of 
 "My Maryland." 
 
 With Watson's blood at Monterey, 
 With fearless Lowe and dashing May. 
 
 The war was at that time just over. Opposite our 
 parsonage there was a hotel. I can remember Colo 
 nel May carrying me on his shoulder down the steps 
 to a barroom, which was underneath the hotel. 
 He had a pair of black ponies, which he kept at the 
 stable behind the hotel. What a hold those ponies 
 must have taken of me is evident from this incident, 
 which is told by my Aunt Agnes, who was living 
 with us at that time. She was an unmarried sister 
 of my mother's, younger than my mother, and a 
 very pretty young woman. It is odd that anybody 
 should be able to tell me incidents about myself 
 when I was four or five years old. But she is still 
 living, past ninety years of age. She was much
 
 Autobiographical Notes 17 
 
 darker than my mother, and she says that when I 
 got angry with her I would call her "Black Aggie." 
 She tells me that on one occasion my mother went 
 out and left her in charge of me and the other chil 
 dren. She says that on this occasion I misbehaved 
 and she slapped me and I became very indignant, 
 and, retreating into a corner of the room, exclaimed 
 in a highly dramatic manner: "You're black 
 you're black as Colonel May's ponies." 
 
 I don't remember that incident, but I do remember 
 the following. At the stable behind the hotel there 
 was an omnibus, which was pulled by four cream- 
 colored horses. I got permission from my father 
 and mother to have this omnibus and the four cream- 
 colored horses come to the house on a certain after 
 noon, with the understanding that I should drive 
 myself. Of course, it was a joke on their part, but I 
 did not at all understand that. I went to the stable, 
 in front of which a man was washing a hind foot of 
 one of the four horses. He was squatting on his 
 hunkers and had the horse's foot in his lap. He had 
 a sponge in his hand, and a bucket by the side of 
 him. I told him to send the horses around to the 
 house after dinner and that it would not be neces 
 sary to have the man who brought the horses remain 
 with them, as I should drive them. I can remember 
 perfectly well the quizzical expression of the man's 
 face, as he stopped his work for a moment and looked 
 at me, still holding the sponge in his hand. I was 
 in such a fever of expectation during dinner that I 
 could not eat anything. My parents seemed to 
 adopt my view of the matter, but my aunt said: 
 "Don't you believe them: they're fooling you." 
 But I would not entertain such an idea for a moment.
 
 1 8 A Virginian Village 
 
 After dinner I went out on the sidewalk in front of 
 the house and waited for the omnibus, fully expect 
 ing that it would drive up any minute. I don't 
 know how long it took me to face the truth that the 
 horses were not coming at all. A boy should not be 
 treated in that way. I think my disappointment 
 at the failure of the horses to appear was as keen as 
 that of a grown man at failing to realize some expec 
 tation of his. Of course, it does not last quite so 
 long. "The tear forgot as soon as shed," says the 
 poet, and that is no doubt true. But the disap 
 pointment is as keen while it lasts. 
 
 One of the most important of the dramatis per 
 sona of our household was Susie. She was with us 
 from first to last not far from seventy years. She 
 came to us as a girl of perhaps sixteen when my 
 brother, next younger than myself, was a few months 
 old, and remained with us until her death a few 
 years ago, at eighty-six. She could never get away 
 from us. There was always a new baby to enchain 
 and fix her affections anew, and the succession con 
 tinued until there had been nine of them. Nor 
 did any of us lose our hold upon her. She was 
 fonder of me, for instance, when I was near seventy, 
 than she had been when I was a child. I was the 
 only child who had not been through her hands, and 
 was thus always at a little disadvantage with her as 
 compared to the others. She got no pay, but simply 
 continued to live with us. She must have had a 
 great influence upon us all. Her opinion upon the 
 simplest matters always very much impressed me, I 
 know. I remember her once walking out with me 
 in Carlisle, Pa., when I was four or five years old, 
 and we saw a boy on stilts. She said that she did
 
 Autobiographical Notes 19 
 
 not approve of stilts, because they were an intima 
 tion to the Almighty that those old wooden legs 
 were better than the flesh ones with which he had 
 provided us. That made a great impression upon 
 me, and even now I cannot see a boy on stilts one 
 does still see it sometimes though rarely without 
 a feeling that there is an impiety and a profanity in 
 the action. It was to her we always had recourse 
 when we were in any kind of trouble and we never 
 got over the habit. Once in a London lodging house 
 when about to start upon a journey, I being a grown 
 man at the time, a cab was at the door and I was late 
 for a train. I was packing a portmanteau and in 
 great distress of mind, because I was unable to find 
 some necessary article of dress. I went to the top 
 of the stairs and shouted her name in a loud voice, 
 although she was three thousand miles away, and I 
 had not seen her in years. 
 
 She could not read or write, but you would 
 rarely meet with anyone whose conversation was 
 more marked by good sense, judgment and humor 
 than hers was. It was not only when she spoke of 
 family matters that this was true, but when she spoke 
 of other subjects as well. 
 
 A sister of mine met in California an old friend 
 of ours, Charles Nordhoff. Nordhoff had lived next 
 door to us in Indiana, and thus had had a good 
 opportunity of observing Susie. He wished to know 
 if she were still living, and being a Methodist, and 
 familiar with the phraseology of that denomination, 
 asked: "Has Susie yet taken her place at the right 
 hand of the Throne?" 
 
 In the spring of 1854 we went to Greenbrier Co., 
 Va., for the summer. We spent the summer with
 
 2O A Virginian Village 
 
 my grandmother. There was a yard of perhaps an 
 acre about her house, with a garden back of that. 
 I was confined to this yard, in which there was 
 an apple tree with the branches, or rather with the 
 twigs, of which I was occasionally switched. It 
 was just as well that I was kept there, for my cous 
 ins, who could run about as they pleased, were pretty 
 bad little boys; their illicit relations with the colored 
 girls began at an early age. The characters of that 
 house, besides my mother and my brother and 
 sisters, and Susie, who of course was with us, were my 
 grandmother and my mother's unmarried sister and 
 their black mammy, Aunt Harriet, and her numerous 
 children, and her husband, Uncle Davie, who was a 
 shoemaker and did not belong to my grandmother, 
 but to a cousin of ours. Harriet's daughter, Betty, 
 a good-looking mulatto girl about 17, had just had 
 a baby. After the birth of her child, she became 
 temporarily insane, as sometimes happens after 
 childbirth. I remember this incident, which will 
 give an idea of what slavery was with us. Betty 
 was in bed in a room in the basement of the house a 
 small boy will stick himself anywhere with impunity 
 and my uncle, who was a doctor, was sitting on 
 the side of the bed and trying to do something with 
 her hands. She was quite out of her head and she 
 fought with him. He was an irascible person, and 
 he struck her with the palm of his hand a very 
 slight tap, which could not have hurt her in the 
 least. Aunt Harriet, her mother, was standing by, 
 and said, "That won't do, you mustn't do that." 
 Betty was before long able to sit out in the yard in 
 a chair, although she still continued insane. Teasing 
 her was one of the few means by which I was able
 
 Autobiographical Notes 21 
 
 to support the intolerable boredom of confinement 
 within the precincts of that yard. I had always 
 been good at throwing stones. Never a bit fond of 
 actual fisticuffs, I could throw stones with any boy 
 and was very good at dodging the stones that were 
 thrown at me. Of course I was not such a little 
 beast as to throw stones at Betty, but I would tease 
 her until she would throw them at me. It was as 
 tonishing the way that girl could throw. I am quite 
 sure she could not have thrown in that way if she 
 had been in her right senses. A girl will usually 
 hold her arm vertically over her head, when she 
 throws, and will often jump up at the same time. 
 Betty did not do that at all, but remained on the 
 ground and threw with a horizontal arm. The 
 stones described no parabolas but would whiz past 
 my ears in a perfectly straight line. Clever as I was 
 at dodging and ducking, it required all the skill I 
 had acquired in stone battles to keep out of the 
 way of those projectiles. 
 
 There was one other way of amusing myself, but 
 that resource I had only on court days. On court 
 days the farmers would tie their horses to the fence 
 at the end of my grandmother's garden, which was on 
 a hill above the village. As soon as the owners of 
 the horses were out of sight, I would mount the ani 
 mals, one by one, and ride them up and down the 
 back lane. I rode all sorts. Sometimes it would 
 be a mare followed by a colt, sometimes a mule and 
 sometimes a half-broken filly, but I never got kicked 
 or thrown or run away with. It is rarely that any 
 thing happens to a boy. 
 
 There was an old negro woman whom my grand 
 father had bought for some very small price out of a
 
 22 A Virginian Village 
 
 drove of slaves that came through our village. He 
 pitied the wretched condition of the poor woman 
 and bought her chiefly to give her a home. She 
 turned out a wonderful cook. That is, she could cook, 
 if she would, but she didn't always choose to do her 
 best. She was very jealous of Aunt Harriet. She 
 used to call her our "lady." If she was asked to do 
 anything and didn't happen to be in a humor for it, 
 she would say: "Get your leddy to do it." 
 
 I had three great-uncles in Greenbrier, who, start 
 ing with little or nothing, accumulated, it was said, 
 $100,000 to $300,000, which was before the war a 
 good deal of money anywhere in the country, and 
 was certainly a great deal to be got out of, or rather 
 off, the ground, for they were graziers and stockmen 
 rather than farmers. The one I remember best was 
 my Uncle Sam who was known in the county as the 
 Colonel; he was a colonel of militia I believe, Col. 
 Sam McClung, he was called. He had prodigious 
 farms in the Richlands, a verdant circular valley 
 of rolling blue-grass pasture, six miles across, just 
 west of the village, which is seen to best advantage 
 late in the day, when it appears, with the grave light 
 of approaching sundown upon it, as a big green stain, 
 surrounded by mountains. It is sometimes called 
 the Big Levels to distinguish it from the Little Levels, 
 a smaller valley in Pocahontas, the county north of 
 us. But I remember him chiefly because he was so 
 good to boys. He used to keep the black sheep 
 skins for us to ride on. One of these, strapped on 
 with a surcingle, made a comfortable saddle for a boy. 
 He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church, but he 
 did not mind doing anybody in a horse trade and 
 telling about it afterwards. My grandmother's
 
 Autobiographical Notes 23 
 
 family he was her brother were noted horse trad 
 ers. I went into a drug store once in Staunton, 
 which is a hundred miles from Greenbrier, and found 
 that the druggist, who was himself a horseman, 
 knew all about the McClungs. He began speaking 
 of Greenbrier, and said that there was in the western 
 part of that county a family of the name of McClung, 
 who were wonderful horse traders. (I had not told 
 him that I was one of them.) He said that a friend 
 of his, who rather fancied himself as a horse trader, 
 wanted to try what he could do with the McClungs, 
 of whom he had heard a great deal. Accordingly 
 he went to the White Sulphur Springs, which is the 
 eastern part of the county, taking with him a 
 thoroughbred mare. He got on his mare and started 
 westward for the McClung country and began 
 trading. He was gone for two or three weeks. When 
 he found himself back at the White Sulphur, he had 
 his old horse back, he had lost one horse, and he was 
 two hundred dollars to the bad. My Uncle Sam was 
 an adept at this business. He thought it an under 
 stood game of skill. 
 
 In 1854 when I was eleven years old my father 
 was appointed Professor of English Literature in a 
 college in Indiana. He was extremely well suited 
 for this work. He was not in the least like a modern 
 instructor in English; he knew nothing of Anglo- 
 Saxon or Italian; but he knew English literature, 
 especially English poetry, very well, and he had a 
 good knowledge of German and of German literature, 
 and he was one of the few people who really love 
 poetry. By means of his strong social qualities he 
 was able to make his interest in literature contagious. 
 He was on that account a very successful teacher.
 
 24 A Virginian Village 
 
 I have a notion that he had some claim to be con 
 sidered a founder of what is known as the "Indiana 
 School." He was extremely sympathetic; with 
 plenty of discrimination and without being at all 
 gullible or over-impressible, he was eager to per 
 ceive, and quick to respond to, indications of ability 
 and intelligence in his students. Such a quality 
 in an instructor is extremely delightful to a young 
 fellow and very encouraging. It is one of the most 
 important qualities a teacher can have. He should 
 be the discoverer of the qualities of the young men 
 under him, instead of being, as I believe he often is, 
 occupied chiefly with the contemplation of his own 
 surprising genius. 
 
 My father had in those boys an eager lot of schol 
 ars. I don't think I have ever seen such an eager lot 
 of youths as they were. The middle west, as it is now 
 called, was then just beginning to come to itself. 
 A generation or two earlier the people had left the 
 hard-favored farms of the Eastern states and had 
 travelled westward until they found a country 
 which could produce eighty bushels of corn and thirty 
 bushels of wheat to the acre. That was true of cer 
 tain parts of Indiana and truer still of Illinois. If 
 the reader has ever attended any of the Old Settlers' 
 Days of that country he must have heard the old 
 men, who could remember that immigration, tell 
 as specimens of the tales told them in the east about 
 the fertility of the western lands stories, many of 
 which, though they were not aware of it, may be 
 found in Munchausen. This would be one of them. 
 A new-comer to the country planted a cucumber 
 seed, which, before he could get away, sprouted and 
 wound itself around his leg. The man put his hand
 
 Autobiographical Notes 25 
 
 in his pocket to get a knife to cut himself loose and 
 found there a cucumber gone to seed. Regarding the 
 mud which the rains made in the deep black loam 
 of the prairies, it was said that a man saw a hat in 
 the road and picking it up, found a man's head 
 under it; he asked the man what he could do for him, 
 but the man said he was all right, that he had a good 
 horse under him. The late R. R. Hitt told me that 
 he had known a mule to be drowned in a mud puddle 
 in Springfield, 111. I have heard old settlers, speak 
 ing of the farms they had left in the east say that 
 these farms, which were often nearly at right angles 
 to the horizon, had this advantage, that when you 
 had plowed a field on one side, you could turn it 
 over and plow it on the other. 
 
 After a generation or two spent in this new coun 
 try, the girls began to take music lessons and the boys 
 to go to college. That was what they were doing in 
 the three years, from 1854 to 1857, when I lived 
 there. Lately in reading John Hay's life, who was 
 one of these prairie boys, I was much struck by his 
 resemblance to the youths I had known in that coun 
 try in the fifties. How keen he was, not only for 
 fame and external success, but to make the most of 
 himself in every way, in culture, in manners and ac 
 complishments. He had the eagerness and the ar 
 dor of those boys whom I knew and who were the 
 products of that renaissance of hog and hominy of 
 which Hay was a result, and from which I profited 
 to some extent. I wish Hay had given us some ac 
 count of those boys and girls at Warsaw with whom 
 he was brought up. I have no doubt they were 
 much like the young men and women I knew. War 
 saw was on the river, and it was said that the soil
 
 26 A Virginian Village 
 
 of the river bottoms was forty feet deep. Of course 
 that meant wealth and music lessons and college 
 educations. A number of these pupils of my father 
 came to be pretty well known afterwards. One of 
 them, I think, was Edward Eggleston, the writer. 
 Another was R. R. Hitt, the diplomatist and mem 
 ber of Congress who was the son of a Methodist 
 minister. Another was Springer, whom I well 
 remember, and who was the leader of the Demo 
 cratic Minority in the House of Representatives, and 
 in that capacity was such a thorn in the side of Czar 
 Reed, the autocratic Speaker. He was a little fel 
 low, in odd physical contrast to the gigantic Reed. 
 He had parliamentary practice at his fingers' ends 
 and was a source of infinite bother to Reed. When 
 the Spanish dancer, Carmencita, was in New York, 
 it was the custom to have her dance at the studios 
 of artists about midnight, after her performances at 
 Coster & Bial's were over. Reed attended one of 
 these .parties and was asked what he thought of her 
 and replied: "I like her very much; I prefer her 
 to the Congressional Springer." 
 
 These young men were very fond of my father, as 
 indeed were all the people connected with the college. 
 At an alumni supper his health was proposed as 
 follows : 
 
 If Webster and Worcester in battle should fall, 
 We'll drop all discussion and appeal to Nadal. 
 
 I have a gold-headed cane which the young men gave 
 him when he left, on which are inscribed these 
 words: "Presented to Professor B. H. Nadal by 
 his students as a token of respect." It is a pretty
 
 Autobiographical Notes 27 
 
 smart-looking stick still and when I wish to be fine, 
 I like to have it in my hand, perhaps from a feeling 
 that it brings me luck. I lately showed it to a jeweller 
 and asked him the value of it. He said that the 
 value of it, when it was made, which was in 1857, 
 would have been about fifty dollars. As some of 
 those boys were living on about a dollar a week, 
 fifty dollars was a great deal for the students to 
 pay. 
 
 I think children suffer a great deal from ennui. 
 Boys of from twelve to fourteen suffer especially 
 from it. When I was thirteen years of age, we were 
 still living in Indiana. We had a little place of 
 fifteen acres, which was on the outskirts of a village. 
 There was some pretty woodland and a peach or 
 chard, of which the yield was prodigious, and a field, 
 which we usually had in corn. But my associations 
 with the place chiefly concern a yard and garden, 
 which were near the house. In the summer vaca 
 tions what was there for a boy to do? At least I 
 had trouble in finding anything to do. I would get 
 so bored that I would poke with a stick down into a 
 bumble bee's nest, which was under a stump on the 
 edge of the wood, until the bees would come out and 
 pursue me. They would get in under my collar or 
 in my pockets or up my legs under my trousers. 
 Then if for some minutes I suffered, it was not from 
 ennui. One distraction was to arrange a battle 
 between two cocks in our back yard under these 
 circumstances. We had a yellow cock, who had been 
 lord of the barnyard until we got a big red Shanghai. 
 The big Shanghai quickly put the yellow cock to 
 flight. At almost any hour you could see him chas 
 ing the yellow rooster about the place. I would
 
 28 A Virginian Village 
 
 catch the yellow cock and take him to the top of 
 a little hill near the hen house and hold him there. 
 The big Shanghai, amazed and enraged to see the 
 little fellow apparently holding his ground, would 
 charge up the hill at him. I would put my foot 
 under the Shanghai and give him a toss, and he 
 would roll down the hill. Very much astonished 
 he would get up and indulge in a moment's reflec 
 tion. It was surprising that anything so small 
 as the eye and head of a chicken could express so 
 much thought. "Could that dirty little yellow 
 rooster have done that?" But as soon as he caught 
 sight of the yellow cock still held by me at the top 
 of the little hill, he would, in a sudden access of 
 rage, charge up the hill, to be rolled down again 
 in the same manner. Once when I was so employed, 
 the Shanghai struck me on the cap of my knee with 
 his spur, which may have been poisonous, and I was 
 lame for some days in consequence. 
 
 I got some amusement from teasing a certain 
 yellow hen. This hen had a history. One night an 
 opossum got into our hen house and, besides com 
 mitting other depredations, ate off the hinder part 
 of this hen, that is, all back of her legs. My father 
 heard the noise in the hen house in the middle of the 
 night, got up, and going to the hen house, hit the 
 opossum on the head with a stick, and he rolled over 
 as if dead. My father should have known better, 
 but he really thought he was dead, and left the hen 
 house for a minute. When he returned the opossum 
 was gone. This hen recovered, and raised many 
 broods of chickens and lived long afterwards, but 
 with a disposition hopelessly soured. As a result 
 of the calamity from which she had suffered, she had
 
 Autobiographical Notes 29 
 
 a curious bobtailed expression, which was in itself 
 ill-tempered and of sinister and evil import. If you 
 came anywhere near her chickens, she would fly right 
 in your face. She could fly a hundred yards, mount 
 ing in the air like any other bird. 
 
 I had a double-barrelled shotgun out of which I got 
 a certain amount of amusement. It was too heavy for 
 me, however. It was all right when I could get a rest 
 over a stump or a fence rail, but when I did not have 
 this advantage, I would raise the gun above the mark 
 I wished to hit and let it drop gradually until I 
 judged the barrel to be in line with the mark, when 
 I would pull the trigger, so that if the bird was not 
 on the wing, the gun was. A red-headed woodpecker, 
 or a yellow-hammer on the side of a tree, made a 
 pretty mark. I was very ambitious to shoot a squir 
 rel, but I shot many woodpeckers and meadow 
 larks before I got one. My first squirrel I got in this 
 way. I was out with another boy shooting, when he 
 shot a squirrel and gave it to me. I had a charge 
 left in my gun and on the way home I put the dead 
 squirrel on a fence and fired the charge into it and 
 told them at home that I had shot it. 
 
 We had some sweet corn for roasting in our garden. 
 The cows would sometimes throw down the fence 
 rails and get in and eat the corn. Somebody said 
 that one way to cure the cows of this habit was to 
 drive them up to the place in the fence where they 
 had broken through and shoot them with dried 
 kernels of corn. My father said that I might do this, 
 and you may be sure that a cruel little boy, hard put 
 to to amuse himself, was quick to take advantage of 
 this suggestion. It was delightful to see the antics 
 of the cows when they were peppered with the corn
 
 30 A Virginian Village 
 
 from the double-barrelled shotgun. I was once in 
 the kitchen loading the gun with the corn, when one 
 of the barrels went off. At this my brother next 
 younger to myself, who was standing near the mouth 
 of the gun, clapped his hands on his stomach and 
 ran out of the kitchen. I supposed I had fired the 
 whole charge into him, and I started in pursuit of 
 him. He was an uncommonly active dead boy, for 
 I had to chase him almost twice around the house 
 before I could catch him. He was not hurt, or at 
 any rate not badly hurt. I suppose the charge had 
 struck the wall and had rebounded against him and 
 stung him. 
 
 In Indiana I became a strong Republican. The 
 Republicans of that day were a happy lot of people; 
 they had such a consciousness of virtue. I believe 
 I thought that all Republicans were good, and I was 
 not far from thinking that all Democrats were bad. 
 The word "Republican," as I saw it on the printed 
 page, looked decent and superior. There was on the 
 other hand something wicked in the appearance of 
 the word "Democrat." That "D" and the "cr" 
 had a sinister look. That had certainly not been the 
 feeling of the Democrats of Jackson's time. I have 
 heard, when a boy, from older men who had been 
 Democrats in their young days what a consciousness 
 of virtue they then had. They thought they were 
 more honest than other men. That was the notion 
 of Jackson himself. When it was said in Jack 
 son's company on one occasion that some foreign 
 visitor to this country had remarked that all the 
 culture and refinement in the country seemed to be 
 on the side of the Whigs, Jackson said, "You should 
 have told him that all the virtue and honesty in the
 
 Autobiographical Notes 31 
 
 country were upon our side." In the years from 
 1856 to 1861, we thought that all the good qualities 
 were on the side of the Republicans. I remember how 
 surprised I was to read that a Republican member of 
 Congress, whom I believed to be both handsome and 
 good, had done something wrong. I thought all 
 Republican leaders were good looking. The photo 
 graph of Sumner, which after the Brooks assault 
 went all over the country, was our notion of the way 
 a Republican looked. I once heard a man say to a 
 person of benevolent and prepossessing appearance: 
 "What a head you've got for a philanthropist to walk 
 through Five Points with." I thought all Republicans 
 looked like that. 
 
 I have a very distinct recollection of two cam 
 paign celebrations in 1856. They were the celebra 
 tions of the two parties. The Republicans had theirs 
 first. Their procession was a rather slender company 
 of men, who looked very worthy, and marched 
 through the streets, two by two. I was disposed to 
 think this display fairly adequate, although I did 
 have a feeling that it was somewhat slight. But 
 when the Democrats had their procession, the streets 
 were black with people. The whole county came 
 into the town. Their procession left the other no 
 where. There were crowds of men marching, and 
 innumerable wagons followed, filled with families 
 of women and children, carrying banners and trans 
 parencies. I saw it all from the plank sidewalk. I 
 was true to my party, but what boy can resist a 
 procession and a brass band? I looked on with 
 something of that unwilling sympathy and admira 
 tion with which the poet Milton watches the march 
 ing of the hosts of Hell :
 
 32 A Virginian Village 
 
 Anon they moved 
 
 In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood 
 Of flutes and soft recorders, such as raised 
 To height of noblest temper heroes old 
 Arming to battle. 
 
 I followed, of course, and went with the procession 
 to a pretty grove which was not far from our house, 
 where they held a barbecue and slaughtered an ox, 
 and distributed other kinds of food. I daresay I 
 ate some of it, and was in no way distinguishable 
 from the Democratic little boys. In five or six years 
 from that time those Democratic little boys were at 
 the front. 
 
 I had only one gift when I was at school in which 
 I was better than other boys, or at least than most 
 other boys. I was a good declaimer or reciter. My 
 first speech was made in the Sunday School in my 
 father's church in Baltimore, when I was nine years 
 old and was in part written by him. He had adapted 
 "You'd scarce expect one of my age" to the exi 
 gencies of the particular occasion on which it was to 
 be delivered and had so altered the piece as to bring 
 in many topical allusions, as they are called, that is, 
 allusions to matters and persons connected with the 
 Sunday School. One of these I call to mind. The 
 reader will remember the original lines: 
 
 If I should chance to fall below 
 Demosthenes or Cicero 
 Don't view me with a critic's eye 
 But pass my imperfections by. 
 
 There were two young men named Armstrong and 
 Coe, who were teachers in the Sunday School and
 
 Autobiographical Notes 33 
 
 were preparing for the ministry. My father altered 
 the lines to read as follows: 
 
 If I should chance to fall below 
 Mister Armstrong or Mister Coe. 
 
 That point was very successful. I remember the 
 immoderate laughter of the Sunday School Superin 
 tendent, and I have perfectly before me the coun 
 tenance of my father, in which parental affection 
 and the pride of authorship were curiously blended. 
 
 At first I used to take my father's suggestions as 
 to pieces to speak. One of the first pieces he had 
 me learn was the character of the parson in "The 
 Deserted Village," "Near yonder copse," etc. But 
 I soon came to know what pieces would suit me and 
 did not always take my father's advice. He wanted 
 me to memorize Paul's speech before Agrippa, but I 
 did not think I could make anything of it. I found 
 in a two-volume life of Henry Clay in my father's 
 library his speech on the Expunging Resolution; I 
 committed to memory the concluding part of that 
 speech, and it was a standby with me for years. Of 
 course, I was fond of "Hohenlinden" and some 
 other pieces, which are in favor with boys who like 
 to recite. I have heard my father relate this inci 
 dent, from which it would appear that I must have 
 done "Hohenlinden" pretty well. I had repeated 
 "Hohenlinden" in the class for declamation at 
 Greencastle, when my father, who had come into 
 the class as a looker-on, got up and volunteered some 
 criticisms of my manner of doing it. Years after 
 wards he told me that the Methodist clergyman of 
 the town, who was present, said to him: "The 
 idea of your having the presumption to criticise
 
 34 A Virginian Village 
 
 that boy, when you know perfectly well you couldn't 
 do it yourself to save your soul from perdition." 
 I doubt if any grown man could do it as a boy twelve 
 years, who has this gift, can do it. He has not a 
 boy's faith. It is perhaps true also that, in a sense, 
 men are not as clever as boys. It has been said that 
 the brain of a boy twelve years old is physiologically 
 a better instrument than it ever is afterwards. It is 
 of course certain that a grown man has not a boy's 
 facility in memorizing. Some years after this, when 
 I was a Sophomore at Columbia College, I once 
 learned by heart in one afternoon, and repeated 
 word for word the next day in Nairne's room, the 
 whole of the chapter in Irving's "History of New 
 York" about the battle between the Swedes and 
 the Dutch. Of course I could not do that now, but 
 even if I knew it by heart, I could not recite it now 
 as I did it then. I should not have the faith in the 
 fun of it I had then. I had a mighty good time 
 doing that. As my father used to say after preach 
 ing a good sermon, "I enjoyed peculiar liberty." 
 It took me twenty minutes to a half hour to repeat 
 it, but during the whole of that time the laugh 
 ter of the boys was uproarious. Nairne was exceed 
 ingly kind and sympathetic. When in describing 
 the encounter between Peter Stuyvesant and the 
 Swedish Chief I would throw myself into an attitude, 
 Nairne would throw himself into an attitude. The 
 noise was such that the President, Charles King, 
 sent down to know what it was about. 
 
 It was surprising what an amount of talent of that 
 kind there was in our class at Columbia. Horatio 
 Potter, a son of the Bishop of that name, had a very 
 marked gift for graceful and spirited declamation.
 
 Autobiographical Notes 35 
 
 He was a very nice fellow, but was, I believe, rather 
 wild, and died early. But the most extraordinary 
 gift in that way which I have ever known any young 
 fellow to have was possessed by a youth named 
 Arthur Sturges in our class. I should have thought 
 he had the making of a great melodramatic actor. 
 He was serious, gentle and extremely nice. He 
 became a clergyman and died early. 
 
 In 1857 my father left his Indiana professorship 
 and went to the Valley of Virginia. We went first 
 to Louisville, from there taking one of the fine boats, 
 which at that time ran between New Orleans and the 
 headwaters of the Ohio. There was a family of New 
 Orleans people on the boat. The boat stopped for 
 an hour or so at the wharf at Cincinnati. One of the 
 gentlemen of this family was leaning over the railing 
 of the upper deck, where he could see the gang plank 
 on the deck below, over which anyone leaving the 
 boat would have to pass. The New Orleans family 
 had with them a mulatto, a tall, good looking fellow, 
 who belonged to them. The gentleman looking over 
 the rail told me that he was watching to see whether 
 this man might not take it into his head to leave the 
 boat. He said he was quite sure he would not do it, 
 but that the "underground railroad" had their 
 agents, whose business it was to help slaves to run 
 away. I am quite sure that the man could have got 
 away, if he had wished to do so. 
 
 At Point Pleasant, where the Kanawha comes into 
 the Ohio, we took a boat that went up the Kanawha 
 as far as Charleston, and from there took the stage 
 to my little mountain village, Lewisburg, in Green- 
 brier County, Va. The distance from Charleston 
 to Lewisburg was only 100 miles, but we had to stop
 
 36 A Virginian Village 
 
 twice for the night in hotels on the way. How 
 jolly and social those stage rides were. You were 
 always going up or going down a mountain. On the 
 way up, the people would often get out and walk. 
 The stages went very slowly up hill and had to make 
 time going down. They would go down a five-mile 
 mountain almost at a gallop. You can imagine how 
 hard it must have been on the fore legs of the horses. 
 The horses got very quickly what was known as 
 ''shoulder jamb," and it was a common saying that 
 no horse was of any account until he had "shoulder 
 jamb." In the winter when most of the stages were 
 laid by there was of course no travel to the Virginia 
 Springs at that season they used to do with the 
 horses what they call "freezing" them. They would 
 turn them out in a field, in which there was a stack 
 of hay and through which a stream of water ran. 
 They left them there with the ice and snow till the 
 spring when they came out all right, or at least all 
 right as stage horses. 
 
 There were two or three persons whom I remember 
 on that stage ride. There was a delightful young 
 fellow, named Vick, from Vicksburg, the grandson 
 of the founder of that town. This youth was not 
 long afterwards killed in a duel. There was also on 
 the stage one of the most remarkable looking persons 
 I ever saw. He was a negro who had committed some 
 crime of violence, and was on his way to Norfolk, 
 in charge of a constable, to be sent to Cuba. I have 
 scarcely ever seen a more impressive figure of a man 
 than he was. He was jet black, some six feet two or 
 three inches in height, very erect and of almost 
 perfect proportions, with a deep chest, broad 
 shoulders, slight waist and narrow flanks. His head
 
 Autobiographical Notes 37 
 
 seemed rather small, perhaps by contrast with the 
 breadth of his shoulders. His features were some 
 what African in character, but not very much so. 
 His face had not in the least the amiability of an 
 American-African countenance, but expressed stern 
 ness and force. I thought he must have been some 
 African King. Indeed that would not have been 
 impossible. Up to the time of the Civil War the slave 
 trade was in full operation and slaves were landed 
 on our southern shores. The late Sir Thomas Powell 
 Buxton, by inheritance a friend of the negro, resented 
 the character of the African as exhibited in the negro 
 minstrel shows. He told me that it did not exist 
 in Africa. Certainly this man had none of it. He 
 was most of the time handcuffed and the constable 
 was careful, when he removed the handcuffs, to have 
 his revolver ready, a proper precaution, no doubt, 
 for the man could easily have cleaned out the whole 
 stage. I was unable to ride inside because I got ill 
 with the motion, but was usually on top of the stage 
 with the driver and the constable and the African 
 King. The driver and the constable and the other 
 men on the seat with the driver did not, however, 
 care to have me with them. As a small boy, I may 
 have been a restraint upon the freedom of their 
 conversation. If the seats by the driver were in 
 demand, they had an excuse for banishing me to the 
 top of the stage with the mail bags and the African 
 King. How we held on going down those mountains 
 I don't understand. We did it, no doubt, by grasping 
 the low railing that ran round the top of the stage. 
 But still even with that help, when going at a gallop 
 over the thank-you-marms, as they are called in 
 New England, holding on could not have been
 
 38 A Virginian Village 
 
 so easy, certainly not for the handcuffed African 
 King. 
 
 We stayed in my native Virginia village two or 
 three days. Leaving the rest of his family there, 
 my father took me with him to the Valley of Virginia, 
 where he had been appointed a Presiding Elder, 
 which means that he had charge of the Methodist 
 churches in a certain "district," as it is called. 
 His district was that part of the Valley which ex 
 tends from Montgomery County to Augusta County, 
 perhaps a hundred miles. The Valley of Virginia 
 lies between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies and 
 is one of the most beautiful regions in the world. Up 
 and down this valley he and I would drive in a buggy. 
 If we had to go into the mountains, where the roads 
 were too rough to permit of travelling on wheels, we 
 would go on horseback. We stayed on the way at 
 people's houses, where we were treated with great 
 kindness and hospitality. 
 
 My father, during the summer of 1857, had two 
 public discussions with a minister of the Southern 
 Methodist Church, the Rev. Dr. Rosser. The Meth 
 odist Church South had seceded from the rest of 
 the church in 1844. Slavery was of course the cause. 
 But a certain amount of slave territory remained with 
 the old church. The Valley of Virginia, where we 
 were, was part of this territory. The Methodists 
 east of the Blue Ridge were in the Southern church. 
 The Southern Methodists sent some of their best 
 speakers into the Valley to persuade the people of 
 the Valley that the Northern Church was an abolition 
 body. My father, in his speeches had to defend the 
 Northern Church from this charge. At the same time 
 he had to admit that the Northern Church was anti-
 
 Autobiographical Notes 39 
 
 Slavery in principle. Considering what the condition 
 of public feeling in the South was in 1857, which was 
 but four years before the war, I am surprised that he 
 should have had the boldness to do this. Nearly 
 all the substantial and respectable people of the 
 community in all the religious denominations were 
 on his side. 
 
 We lived in Salem, in Roanoke County. I recall 
 this incident. They were building a parsonage next 
 to the church. I was looking on at the work one day, 
 when an overseer began beating with a cowhide a 
 little boy, who was carrying mortar. In Baltimore 
 and in my own Virginia country, I had never seen a 
 slave struck with a whip. In Indiana I had been 
 reading about such cruelty in the "Semi-Weekly 
 Tribune" for a year or more, and here I was face to 
 face with it. I picked up half a brick, and started 
 for the man. But whether I was afraid to throw it 
 I was only fourteen and small of my age or whether 
 I reflected that if I hit the man with the brick my 
 father would not be able to remain in the country 
 (and that did occur to me), I dropped the brick, and 
 ran down to an office, where my father was sitting 
 with half a dozen of his friends, and told him in a very 
 excited manner that the overseer had been most 
 cruelly beating a little black boy. The men in the 
 office exchanged with one another a look, as if to 
 say, "This is pretty awkward." My father said 
 sternly, "Mind your own business." I went away 
 and climbed into the loft of a stable and lay there 
 upon a pile of hay, very much broken up. The men 
 who were sitting with my father, when I burst into 
 the room and made this remark, and who were 
 devoted friends of his, would probably have been as
 
 40 A Virginian Village 
 
 much disgusted with the sight as I was. But a kind 
 of terrorism was abroad, and had been daily growing 
 stronger and stronger, which no man dared offend 
 and in the face of which it was quite impossible to 
 take the side of a negro against a white man. It 
 had formerly been possible to punish a white man for 
 cruelty to a slave. About 1845 a white man had 
 been turned out of a church, which my father had, 
 in the Valley of Virginia, for cruelty to a slave. 
 But I doubt if that would have been possible after 
 the Republican Party had come into existence, and 
 the Summers and such folk had begun to get in their 
 fine work. A few days after the incident which I 
 have just mentioned, one Sunday afternoon I saw a 
 man in full pursuit of this overseer, and I had the 
 satisfaction of seeing the beater of the little black boy, 
 although he had a pistol in his hand, running for dear 
 life. 
 
 I lately asked someone from the Valley of Virginia 
 if there was not a little place on the macadamized 
 road that runs the length of the valley called Spring 
 field. He said he thought there was. I asked "Is 
 there a steep, rather long hill southwest of the place, 
 with a little stream crossing the road at the bottom 
 of it?" He thought there was. I have this recol 
 lection of that place. We had driven from Salem to 
 Staunton, a distance of about 100 miles and were 
 returning. In passing this place I asked my father 
 the name of it. He said, "You're wool-gathering, 
 inattentive boy. I told you the name of this place, 
 when we came through before." I said, "I am sure 
 I can tell you the name before we get to the bottom 
 of the hill." My father said, "We'll see." I had 
 noticed crossing the stream, at the bottom of the
 
 Autobiographical Notes 41 
 
 hill, a covered carriage, drawn by two horses, the 
 front seat, on which there was a colored man driving, 
 separated by glass from the inside where there were 
 two ladies. I had the reins and was on the left side 
 of the buggy. My father was on the right, reading 
 a book. In passing the carriage, I called out to the 
 colored driver: "Uncle, what's the name of this 
 place." "Springfield, sah," said he. My father 
 tried to cover my ears with his hands. The two 
 ladies inside laughed, although they could not pos 
 sibly have known what the joke was. But when 
 did two women ever fail to laugh when they might 
 have done so? 
 
 The roads were too rough for driving when we 
 went into the mountains, and we would then go horse 
 back. I recall one all day ride of twenty miles in the 
 mountains in winter, the roads being full of snow and 
 ice and the going slow. I rode a little bay roly- 
 poly of a Morgan horse, an animated machine; with 
 the attractions of an animal he was as reliable as a 
 machine. I have seen no such horse at their Morgan 
 Horse Show in Vermont. He slipped on some ice 
 at the top of a steep hill, about the only wrong thing 
 I ever knew him to do, and rolled with me to the 
 bottom, neither the horse nor I the least bit the 
 worse for it. After that long ride, I was of course 
 pretty stiff and cold when I got off the horse. We 
 stayed in a kind of log house, which was, however, 
 very comfortable. How pleasant the blazing logs 
 were, and how good the sausage and buckwheat 
 cakes we had for supper! Our hostess was a large, 
 strong, handsome woman of about forty, of a noble 
 appearance and with a friendly face. The house had 
 two stories, we had to go up a ladder to our room,
 
 42 A Virginian Village 
 
 climbing with hands and feet, when we went to bed. 
 My father had been asked to preach on Infant Bap 
 tism. Some missionary of the Baptists had been 
 preaching in these mountains against infant baptism, 
 and his arguments had proved too much for the local 
 Methodist theologians. My father preached on 
 Sunday morning in a kind of schoolhouse, warmed by 
 a big iron stove in the middle of the room, to about 
 fifty people. He left the desk and stood in the midst 
 of the people, so as to be near the stove. I don't 
 think he cared very much about Infant Baptism, 
 but I never saw him enjoy anything more. His 
 artist nature was pleased and his mind awakened by 
 the faith of these simple people and their belief and 
 confidence in him. It was a striking scene. With 
 out, beyond the windows, was the hard and ragged 
 scenery of the Alleghenies in midwinter, the moun 
 tains covered with snow, and with the black trunks 
 and bare branches of the trees to the tops. He had 
 the points of the subject at his fingers' ends as a 
 matter of memory, but he had no doubt arranged 
 them in his mind. For two hours he stood in the 
 midst of the delighted mountaineers, his eyes very 
 bright and speaking with the utmost animation, 
 and wiped the floor with the Baptist controversialist, 
 or at least did so in the opinion of the listening 
 Methodists, and, of course, in mine. 
 
 For two years, 1858 to 1860, my father lived in 
 Washington and I went to school there. Then for 
 two years 1860-62 my father was at the Sands 
 Street Methodist Church in Brooklyn. Under the 
 pulpit of this church, the celebrated preacher, 
 John Summerfield, was buried. G. W. Curtis in 
 troduces him into his novel "Trumps," which was
 
 Autobiographical Notes 43 
 
 printed in "Harper's Weekly," possibly with the idea 
 of pleasing the Harpers who were Methodists. Mr. 
 Wesley Harper, a great friend of my father's and of 
 mine, was a member of this church. I have heard 
 him say that he considered my father "the perfect 
 preacher." One Sunday morning, Dr. Durbin, when 
 preaching in this church, in calling for some witness 
 to attest the truth of the Christian doctrines he 
 was proclaiming, looked downward and cried out, 
 "John Summerfield, come up," which produced a 
 great effect upon the congregation. Dr. Durbin 
 was perhaps the greatest oratorical genius I have 
 ever heard. I heard him once preach in this church 
 from the text, "Likewise joy shall be in heaven over 
 one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety and 
 nine just persons that need no repentance." He said 
 this was in 1860 "Suppose someone should come 
 here and tell us 'Queen Victoria is alive.' That would 
 not greatly interest us. But suppose someone should 
 come in here and cry out, 'Sir John Franklin is 
 alive.' ' : I have never known any speaker to equal the 
 dramatic effect of that exclamation, as he gave it. I 
 have never heard anything on the stage to equal it 
 in reality and in the thrilling effect it produced. 
 Andrew Jackson was, by the way, a great admirer of 
 Durbin's preaching. He once refused to appoint a 
 man Secretary of legation at St. Petersburg because 
 the man had said that Durbin was not a great 
 preacher. Jackson said, "The man must be a fool." 
 The parsonage in which we lived adjoined the 
 church and a little graveyard which was back of the 
 church. One evening when I was a Freshman at Co 
 lumbia, I was sitting in the parlor of this parsonage. I 
 had been ill and had been for several days confined to
 
 44 A Virginian Village 
 
 the house and was about recovered. A man and a 
 woman came in and said they had come to be married. 
 I told them that my father was out, but that he would 
 be back before long and advised their waiting. With 
 them was one of the most beautiful young women I 
 have ever seen. I found out afterwards who she was. 
 Her name was Nelly Slocum; she was the daughter 
 of a Brooklyn tailor. She was a girl of perhaps 
 nineteen and she was as good as she was beauti 
 ful. The three sat on a hair cloth mahogany sofa 
 just underneath a white plaster medallion of John 
 Wesley in a black oval frame. Under the combined 
 influence of beauty and of convalescence I became 
 expansive and communicative. The people seemed 
 amused, and the time until my father's return ap 
 peared to pass quickly with them. My father came 
 back; the couple were married and departed the 
 Lord knows whither, and the young lady went with 
 them. A few weeks afterwards I was walking in one 
 of those Brooklyn streets that have botanical or 
 vegetable names, such as Orange, Pineapple or Cran 
 berry it was a Spring afternoon and the trees were 
 green when I met this young lady. I went up to her 
 and reminded her of our former meeting and asked 
 if I might walk in her direction, and I went with 
 her as far as her house. She entered and stood 
 in the middle of the floor of the front parlor. I 
 followed and, going up to her, asked her if I might kiss 
 her, to which she consented. I was seventeen years 
 old and small of my age, and she was a well grown 
 young woman, so that she was nearly a head taller 
 than I. It was the barest touch of the lips, and I 
 don't think that either she or I was in an especially 
 susceptible condition, but a curious result followed.
 
 Autobiographical Notes 45 
 
 It was as if I had collided suddenly and carelessly 
 with an infernal machine. I seemed to be thrown 
 violently backwards some twenty feet through the 
 air by the force of the recoil. In the way in which 
 the sensations ran back and forth between my hands 
 and my feet, the effect produced resembled the blow 
 of a cat o' nine tails, as I have seen it described by 
 some man who had undergone it. This was followed 
 by a dull ache, such as I have sometimes felt when 
 very severely kicked by a gun, one of the old muzzle- 
 loaders, which has been left standing for six months 
 with a charge in it. 
 
 After leaving Columbia, I was two years at Yale. 
 I hope some day to have something to say about 
 both colleges, but I must hurry along now. 
 
 After I left Yale and when I was looking about for 
 something to do, I wrote to the Principal of a Semi 
 nary for young men and women on the Susquehanna, 
 asking to be employed as a teacher of Greek and 
 Latin. The Principal replied that that place in his 
 institution was already filled, but that I might have 
 what he called the "chair of Natural Science," salary 
 $400.00 a year, room, board, lights, washing, etc., 
 included. I replied that I should be happy to take 
 the place, but that I knew nothing about the sub 
 ject. He answered that that made no difference, or 
 words to that effect. I then thought that I could 
 honestly undertake the work. I was at this institu 
 tion for a year, a year which was one of the pleasant- 
 est and most interesting of my life. I would keep 
 some three or four pages ahead of the classes in the 
 text-books. I don't think they found me out. Now 
 and then I would see some sharp farmer lad who 
 I fancied was on to me, but the girls did not suspect
 
 46 A Virginian Village 
 
 me. Some years later I met one of these young 
 ladies, to whom I confessed that I knew nothing of 
 the subjects I was teaching. At this the expression 
 of her countenance grew sad and thoughtful, and 
 she said "Well, the girls thought you did." 
 
 Many of these young women were of what is 
 known as "Pennsylvania Dutch" extraction. They 
 had German names and German characteristics. 
 Among other qualities of race, they had the softness 
 of the heroines of Goethe. One of them was Mary 
 F. who had a gliding motion in walking and a patient 
 way of holding the shoulders. She had auburn hair, 
 inclined to be red, and hazel eyes, and a delicate fair 
 complexion, slightly freckled. I don't think I have 
 ever seen any young woman in whom the throat, 
 chin and cheek were more delicately modeled than 
 hers were. Some of these young ladies belonged to 
 a class in Astronomy which I taught. There were 
 young men also in the class, the seats for the boys 
 being separate from those for the girls. Most of 
 these young ladies were Methodists. There was at 
 one time a revival going on at the Methodist Church 
 in the town. The young ladies would attend the 
 revival meeting in the evening and I thought they 
 did not have their lessons quite so well learned as 
 usual on this account, though they learned them 
 much better than I learned mine when I was in col 
 lege. On one occasion I told these ladies, or 
 rather I told the class, that they had better take 
 advantage of their present neighborhood to the 
 heavenly bodies in order to obtain a knowledge of 
 them, for that in a future state of existence they 
 might not be so close to them a most impudent 
 and foolish remark for a young fellow of twenty-one
 
 Autobiographical Notes 47 
 
 to make to young ladies who were very near his own 
 age. Shortly after the class had been dismissed, 
 the principal of the Seminary, a very fine and strong 
 character, came to me and said that some of the 
 young ladies, who were members of this class, were 
 very deeply grieved over something I had said to 
 them, that they were in his parlor and that I had 
 better go there and try and make my peace with 
 them, if that were possible. He evidently thought 
 the situation pretty serious. Accordingly I went 
 to this room and found perhaps half a dozen young 
 ladies who were in tears, or who had been in tears 
 and whose eyes were still red with weeping. I 
 asked them what I had done. They said that I had 
 made light of their most sacred religious feelings 
 and had in effect charged them with hypocrisy and 
 they said a great deal besides. It was a very awk 
 ward moment, but I succeeded in expressing my re 
 gret and contrition in such a way as to obtain their 
 forgiveness. 
 
 The Seminary had an annual picnic in a grove some 
 three miles down the river. The school went down 
 in wagons. I thought I should like to row down the 
 river, and I got one of the flat-bottomed boats, big 
 clumsy things they used on the river. It was easy 
 rowing down stream. I took the middle of the stream 
 and thus got the help of the current. Late in the 
 afternoon I left the picnic grounds for a while with 
 half a dozen of the young ladies. We must have 
 been gone longer than I thought, for when we got 
 back we found it was nearly dark, that everybody 
 had left and that there was nothing for me to do 
 but to pull these half-dozen young women a pretty 
 substantial load they were three miles upstream.
 
 48 A Virginian Village 
 
 It was mighty hard work. I kept in shore and thus 
 avoided as much as possible the strength of the cur 
 rent, but even at that it was hard work. The young 
 women looked the sympathy they were too tactful to 
 express. Among the number were two strapping 
 damsels, with Pennsylvania Dutch names, either of 
 whom, if she had taken an oar and had known how to 
 row, could have pulled me out of the boat. I think 
 it must have taken me two hours to pull the boat up 
 those three miles. 
 
 'I became very intimate with the family of the 
 Principal of the Seminary. The son of the Principal, 
 Jim Mitchell, was one of the brightest and sharpest 
 fellows I ever knew. He had contracted as a child 
 some form of heart disease. When he was about ten 
 years old, he had been for a long time confined to his 
 bed with this disorder. The doctors called it "Ossifi 
 cation of the semilunar valves of the heart." The 
 little boy was proud to have a disease with such a 
 long name. The sympathizing ladies of the town, 
 who came to his bedside, would say, "Poor Jimmie, 
 what's the matter, Jimmy?" The child would answer, 
 with a good deal of importance: "Ossification of the 
 semilunar valves of the heart." With his abilities, 
 he ought to have become a successful man, and he 
 might perhaps have become so in spite of his disease. 
 But he was a reckless fellow, and took no care of 
 himself, and did not live many years after the period 
 of my friendship with him. The Principal's house 
 was under the same roof with the seminary and at 
 one end of it. It was all the more homelike and 
 pleasant by contrast with the bare walls and board 
 floors of the seminary. I have a memory of three 
 rooms, one a little parlor, with a piano at which
 
 Autobiographical Notes 49 
 
 Jim's sister would sometimes sing. You entered this 
 parlor from a roofed-over porch, which in summer 
 was covered with roses. The porch looked down on 
 the Susquehanna and beyond into the graceful slope 
 of the verdant Bald Eagle range of mountains, a 
 spur of the Alleghenies. Beyond the parlor and 
 opening out of it was a little sitting room, where we 
 sat most of the time. I can imagine no future state 
 of existence in which I should be able to forget the 
 kindness and friendship which are associated with 
 those rooms. Opening out of the sitting room and 
 on the other side from the parlor was a room which 
 contained nothing but apples, which lay from one to 
 two feet deep upon the floor. There were two kinds, 
 sheep-noses and greenings. I much preferred the 
 sheep-noses. I have ever since retained a liking for 
 that apple. It is the same as a gillyflower. It is odd, 
 considering the scarcity of good names, that one little 
 oblong apple of a maroon red, with perhaps a streak 
 of dull green, should have two such good names. 
 One of my classes was in declamation, a subject I 
 was fairly well qualified to teach. There was a boy 
 of thirteen or fourteen years old in this class, who 
 had a remarkable gift for declaiming. One of his 
 pieces was a poem called "The Black Regiment," 
 by George H. Boker, which describes an incident of 
 the Civil War, a negro regiment going into battle. 
 There were two lines which the boy gave with a 
 ringing voice and in a very spirited manner: 
 
 Down the long dusky line, 
 Teeth gleam and eye balls shine. 
 
 Many years afterwards I told Boker about this boy's 
 manner of reciting these two lines, which had stuck
 
 50 A Virginian Village 
 
 in my head and which I was able to repeat to him, 
 always a thing worth while doing with a poet. He 
 told me that a curious incident had happened in rela 
 tion to these two lines. He said that the poem ap 
 peared in the "Atlantic Monthly" and that he was 
 living at the time in Philadelphia. Shortly after the 
 poem came out, a deputation of colored men came 
 one day to his office. They told him that they were 
 greatly flattered by the poem, which they considered 
 a great compliment to their race. But they said that 
 it contained two lines, which were like white people's 
 way of looking at colored people, and seemed a little 
 sarcastic, and they instanced these two lines. He 
 said that nothing could have been further from his 
 intention than in any way to throw ridicule upon the 
 colored race and asked: "Don't you think it's true?" 
 They replied, "Oh yes, that's niggah." After a little 
 more talk, they reconsidered and withdrew their 
 request, and, having consented that the lines should 
 remain, got up and gravely departed. 
 
 I had at times an interest in politics. I was, for 
 instance, warmly opposed to the impeachment of 
 Johnson. I have never seen Cant so rampant in this 
 country as it was at the time of the Impeachment 
 trial. You would have thought you were in Eng 
 land. Cant, I suppose, is talking what you think 
 other people think. I could not see that people 
 individually really wanted to have Johnson turned 
 out of the Presidency. But each thought that every 
 body else did. I remember during the trial going in 
 the same carriage with three ministers to a funeral. 
 Chief Justice Chase, who presided at the trial, had 
 made some decisions the practical effect of which 
 was in Johnson's favor. Chase's decisions were in
 
 Autobiographical Notes 51 
 
 accordance with the law or, at any rate, with the law, 
 as he understood it. He was the chief judicial officer 
 of the country and might have been supposed to 
 know something about law. But the canters were 
 all scandalized. "How are the mighty fallen!" these 
 three donkeys kept braying, none of them really 
 caring much about the matter or having given any 
 thought to it. 
 
 Of course, as an office holder, I was interested in the 
 reform of the Civil Service. I sent an editorial on the 
 subject to the "New York Evening Post" which I was 
 surprised to find they printed. The civil service 
 never at any other time reached so low a condition as 
 during the years from 1867 to 1870. Each civil servant 
 was held in his place by the favor of some politician. 
 Ever since Jackson's time, no doubt, the tenure had 
 been pretty insecure. But if a man had an office, he 
 usually remained in it. I said in the "Evening 
 Post" article that the inertia had formerly been one 
 of rest, but that under Johnson and Grant the 
 inertia had become one of motion: "The office 
 holder is a piece of paper, and the politician is the 
 paper weight that keeps him in place. Take off the 
 politician, and the office holder naturally blows 
 about." 
 
 From the time I left Yale until I became a diplo 
 mat, I had however only one real interest. I had also 
 one real employment, although I had followed in suc 
 cession several vocations to make a living. I was a 
 government clerk and I was a teacher. But my one 
 real employment was to sit on fences and look at nat 
 ural scenery. I did indeed have one other occupa 
 tion. What is the occupation which at that age agrees 
 easily with all other pursuits? And I took, as I have
 
 52 A Virginian Village 
 
 said, a certain interest in politics, was opposed to the 
 punishment of the South for the assassination of 
 Lincoln, which was not their fault, and thought the 
 impeachers of Johnson throughout the country fa 
 natics, demagogues, or the dupes of Cant, chiefly the 
 last. But my mind was given to nature. I must have 
 got to know a great deal about scenery, if that can be 
 called knowledge which fades from the mind and is 
 forgotten as soon as it is acquired. If I had been a 
 painter, I might have made some use of this knowl 
 edge. Perhaps I might even have made some use of it 
 as a writer. But at that time, when I really knew 
 something about scenery, I did not seem to be able to 
 make a scratch with a pen. Nor had I much desire 
 to write anything I have written a good deal about 
 scenery since that time, and have been told that I 
 have rather a pretty gift for that kind of writing. 
 But I could not do it then. This pursuit, i. e., that 
 of sitting on fences and looking at natural scenery, I 
 daresay has some advantages. I should not expect a 
 young fellow so employed to do me in a horse dicker, 
 or to tell me any lies of any kind. But it is not 
 favorable to that energy and spirit of enterprise 
 which should characterize a young man. The de 
 lights which such occupations afford and the ecsta 
 sies of religious enthusiasts which they resemble, are 
 they so very different in their essence from more 
 sensual pleasures, which are at the same time inno 
 cent? Is there not something in such feelings akin 
 to the sensual? This was then the life I had been 
 leading for five years, when by the unexpected recep 
 tion of a diplomatic appointment, I was "yanked" 
 off the top rail of a stake-and-ridered fence into the 
 middle of London life.
 
 Autobiographical Notes 53 
 
 I got the appointment in this way. General 
 Grant's secretary, General Adam Badeau, had gone 
 out with Mr. Motley as second secretary of legation. 
 He came back and resigned. General Grant's inten 
 tion. was to appoint Mr. Fish's son, Nicholas, in his 
 place. For reasons which it is unnecessary to explain, 
 Mr. Fish did not wish his son to take this place. 
 Mr. Creswell, the Postmaster General, an old friend 
 of my father's, suggested me in the meeting of the 
 Cabinet. The fact that General Grant knew my 
 father was no doubt an advantage. 
 
 Mr. Motley was the minister. His was a brilliant 
 legation. He had a fine house, in which he enter 
 tained many Americans, the best English company, 
 and, of course, the diplomats. Mrs. Motley was at 
 that time taking care of the diplomats on Sunday 
 evenings. The first Sunday evening I was in England 
 I went to one of these parties. Mr. Motley took me 
 up to a stout old gentleman in a red fez, Musurus 
 Pasha, the Turkish Ambassador, and asked if he 
 might introduce me to his daughters. As a green 
 American youth, who had never before been out of 
 his own country, I should have supposed that a 
 Turkish diplomat in a red fez would be a Moham 
 medan. I did not know that Turkish diplomats were 
 very often Greeks and Christians. Mr. Motley then 
 introduced me to two extremely pretty girls, who 
 were the daughters of Musurus. They were natives 
 of London and had lived there all their lives, but 
 they spoke English with a marked accent. 
 
 A few evenings later, I dined at Mr. Motley's 
 and met some distinguished people, among them 
 Lord Houghton, Mrs. Norton, and the poet Brown 
 ing. Sir William Sterling Maxwell, author of a work
 
 54 A Virginian Village 
 
 upon the history of Spanish art, who afterwards mar 
 ried Mrs. Norton, was there. He told this story 
 about Lord Houghton, who must by this time have 
 left the house. He, Maxwell, was at the Tuileries 
 in an ante-room with a number of others waiting to 
 go in to be presented to Louis Philippe, among them 
 Houghton, Monckton Milnes, as he then was. There 
 was only one chair in the room, which was kept there 
 for Louis Philippe's minister, Soult, Napoleon's mar 
 shal. Into this Milnes threw himself and, throwing 
 one leg over an arm of the chair, went on laughing 
 and talking with a number of men standing about. 
 Soult presently came into the room, went up to the 
 chair, in which Milnes, who did not see him, still 
 sat, talking and laughing. After standing for a mo 
 ment, looking sadly at Milnes, Soult turned and 
 hobbled off. 
 
 Browning and Mrs. Norton remained for some 
 time talking. They were talking of mottoes and 
 coat-of-arms. Browning told of one he liked; an 
 eagle is represented as flying up in the face of the 
 Sun, and the motto is "Dazzle others; thou canst 
 not dazzle me." Mrs. Norton objected that the 
 motto should be in Latin, but Browning said, "Oh 
 no." He told this story: A great Lord was once 
 riding through his Park and saw some boys playing 
 there; he rode up to them and, taking off a ring, on 
 which there was a seal containing a crest and a motto, 
 asked one of the boys if he could read the motto. It 
 was Fuimus, "we were," a boastful assertion of the 
 antiquity of his family. The syllables were however 
 separated by a dot, as often occurs in inscriptions. 
 The boy read Fui "I was," mus "a mouse." 
 
 Motley was an old friend of Mrs. Norton. You will
 
 Autobiographical Notes 55 
 
 find an interesting sketch of her in one of his letters 
 in the volume of correspondence, edited by Lady 
 Harcourt. From the qualities displayed in that 
 volume, I should have thought that he might have 
 reached distinction in some form of literature lighter 
 than history. 
 
 Shortly after this the Queen of Holland, who was 
 a friend of the Motleys, came to London. She was 
 literary and interested in literary people. When she 
 came to London, Motley gave a dinner to which he 
 asked a number of literary men. I had just come to 
 London and was of course vastly pleased at seeing these 
 great men. Dickens, Grote, the historian, Browning, 
 Froude, Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Norton, Lord Houghton 
 and others were there. I was introduced to Grote, a 
 benignant old gentleman, very tall and thin. I 
 thought that the marble bust of him, with which I 
 was familiar in the first volume of his history, had 
 been set upon a pair of long slim legs and was walk 
 ing about. He impressed me as having a courtesy, 
 which was a thing, not of manner but of the spirit. 
 Mrs. Grote whom Sidney Smith said was the origin 
 of the word "grotesque" was not there. But I 
 heard her a few days later, make a speech at a 
 Woman's Suffrage meeting, in which she referred to 
 John Stuart Mill, who was on the platform, as "our 
 leader." A rather queer looking, somewhat conceited 
 and infinitely kind-hearted old dame, I should 
 think. The young author, Lecky, who afterwards 
 married a Lady in Waiting of the Queen, who had 
 come to London with her, was there. I wondered 
 if Dickens was not struck by Lecky's resemblance 
 to Tom Pinch in the illustrations in "Martin Chuzzle- 
 wit." It was a Tom Pinch, turned gentleman, who
 
 56 A Virginian Village 
 
 had distinguished himself at the University and writ 
 ten a book. I think this was about the last time 
 Dickens went anywhere. He died about two weeks 
 afterwards. I was at breakfast one Sunday morning 
 at the Oatland's Park Hotel near Weybridge, sitting 
 opposite at a long table to two rather interesting 
 examples of their highly specialized English society, 
 evidently commercial, very red and very big; the 
 man, who had a newspaper, said to his wife that 
 Charles Dickens was dead. 
 
 Mr. Motley was, of course, a highly gifted man. 
 He was very handsome and had great powers of 
 pleasing and a marked gift for distinguished society. 
 He seemed to express in his brilliant person some 
 thing of the poetry of good society. He had one 
 very important element of success and happiness 
 in his domestic relationships, in the devotion of a 
 wife, who, I should think, was about as good a one 
 as a man ever had, a woman of great sense and 
 force of character and of great kindness, and in the 
 society of his clever and accomplished young daugh 
 ters. There will be no harm in my saying at this 
 distance of time that this distinguished man was a 
 little too high-strung and sensitive for a diploma 
 tist. That was the opinion of his greatest friends 
 and admirers. The philosopher Emerson once said 
 to me about him that he had had occasion to observe 
 in him certain "pretty irritabilities." 
 
 The diplomatic house which did the most enter 
 taining was the German Embassy. The Ambassador 
 was Count Von Bernstorff, a grave, thoughtful and 
 very nice man, the father of the present German 
 Ambassador in Washington. I remember a party 
 given in that house to meet the Count of Flanders
 
 Autobiographical Notes 57 
 
 and his wife, the parents of the present King of 
 Belgium. The Count was a blond man, much fairer 
 than his brother, the late King. He was a tall man, 
 with a large frame, spare of flesh. He had light blue 
 eyes and a hook nose. He was altogether a rather 
 significant looking person. His wife was a noble 
 looking young woman, also of good height, who was 
 handsome and looked as nice as she was beautiful. 
 People would be brought up to her one by one to 
 be introduced. Among them was a certain Mrs. L., 
 whom it was the fashion to ridicule. I was standing 
 near Lord Lytton, the novelist, and Hayward was 
 talking to him. Lord Lytton was deaf, and I could 
 not help hearing the remark that Hayward made: 
 It was: "Did you see the Princess stare at Mrs. L.? 
 I liked her for it; it showed a fine instinct." I was 
 shocked at such back-biting of an inoffensive woman, 
 but then the young have very exalted ideas. The 
 Princess looked much like the pictures of her son. 
 
 Hayward was a small man, who had at that time 
 a rather handsome and distinguished look, which 
 he afterwards lost. He was always a great scoffer, 
 and was also noted for his risque conversation. He 
 once told me that the night before he had been at one 
 of the city dinners, and that Lord Dufferin sat op 
 posite him. The table was very wide and Hayward 
 said he was sorry that, on account of the width of 
 the table, they were so far apart. Dufferin said: 
 "Then you must make your jokes the broader" 
 Hayward thought that " Sheridanic." 
 
 My most intimate friend in London was a curate 
 of a church in Islington. My class mate at Yale, 
 the late George Spring Merriam, the greatest friend 
 of my life, who had met him in Switzerland, gave
 
 58 A Virginian Village 
 
 me a letter to him. I was a great deal with him and 
 at his church. The Sunday evening 7 o'clock serv 
 ices I thought very attractive. The Vicar was 
 Alfred Blomfield, a son of a former Bishop of London, 
 who was of the ecclesiastical swells of the middle of 
 the last century. Alfred Blomfield was himself a 
 clever man, who had had a distinguished career at 
 Oxford. I particularly remember one of these evening 
 services. It was when I had first made the acquaint 
 ance of the Blomfields. Mrs. Blomfield was a 
 fine example of a comely English woman, large and 
 full, decidedly handsome. One of Blomfield's 
 curates used to tell me that he thought her almost 
 a perfectly beautiful woman. There was staying 
 with them the daughter of a clergyman at Tunbridge 
 Wells, who was as fine a type of a fresh young Eng 
 lish blond as you would meet with anywhere. It 
 was my privilege to sit between these two ladies 
 in the Vicar's pew, which was very near the chancel. 
 The pew was filled up. There was standing in the 
 middle aisle a young woman, who was waiting to 
 take some vacant seat near at hand as soon as the 
 bell stopped ringing. That is an English custom. 
 The seats are kept for the pew-owners till the bell 
 stops ringing, when anybody is free to take a seat. 
 In those days I had rather weak eyes, which I pro 
 tected from very bright light by wearing colored 
 spectacles. The lights on the altar were raised, 
 and I had recourse to my blue glasses. I think 
 the ladies got an impression that this was some 
 what singular. With my eyes protected, I found 
 myself very comfortable in these snug quarters. 
 But I was conscious of a somewhat insecure feeling 
 from the presence of the young woman, who was
 
 Autobiographical Notes 59 
 
 standing in the aisle at the end of the pew. Presently 
 the pew began to assume to my mind the semblance 
 of the long seat inside an omnibus. With some 
 apprehension I turned to Mrs. Blomfield and asked 
 whether there was any danger of a gentleman being 
 asked to ride outside to oblige a lady. At that I 
 am sure the two ladies thought that I was quite 
 daft. Indeed they afterwards told me that they did. 
 Not many years ago I was on a visit to England and 
 was walking in Piccadilly and happened to meet 
 Blomfield, who had in the meantime become a 
 Bishop. He said: "We still have your joke about 
 being asked to ride outside to oblige a lady." 
 
 I must say something about Matthew Arnold, 
 who was a pretty large figure in my mind when I was 
 a young fellow. I remember perfectly well the first 
 time I heard of him. I was a senior at Yale and had 
 come to New York for the Christmas vacation. A 
 friend of mine knew the poet, R. H. Stoddard, who 
 was at that time a clerk in the Custom House, and 
 took me to see him there. He said there was an 
 English poet who was a son of Doctor Arnold, 
 named Matthew Arnold. I knew something about 
 Doctor Arnold from "Tom Brown," and supposed 
 that his son must be clever. I liked the name 
 Matthew, not so usual in this country as in England, 
 and I liked his having only one name, whereas most 
 of our own poets had two and wrote them out in full. 
 After I returned to New Haven I saw on the counter 
 of a book store in Chapel Street a paper-covered 
 essay of his, that on Heine. I thought that wonder 
 fully clever. Then I asked the Yale librarian, Ad- 
 dison Van Name, with whom and Charley Grinnell 
 I used to go swimming in the harbor, to send for a
 
 60 A Virginian Village 
 
 copy of Arnold's poems. I read the poems with 
 delight, but when I read the prose introduction to 
 them, I thought the author was little less than a 
 god. What a contempt for clever irrelevant things 
 this god-like being had ! When I thought of a clever 
 thing, I was only too glad to put it down, but here 
 was a wonderful person, who in his severity would 
 sacrifice the most beautiful ideas, which, of course, 
 came to him as thick as blackberries, if they did 
 not assist the ultimate purpose he had in mind. 
 I thought of him as a tall, pale, handsome person, 
 who knew all the Greek and Latin poetry that ever 
 was written, and German, French, and Italian poetry 
 besides. I thought he judged all this literature with 
 absolute infallibility, and I was pretty near thinking 
 that he was almost as infallible when he spoke upon 
 other subjects besides literature. There is no ques 
 tion that he did have a very delicate perception of 
 poetry. Indeed what English critic is his equal in 
 this respect? I continued to be in this frame of 
 mind about him for several years. A good Methodist 
 girl once gave me a Morocco bound copy of the Bible, 
 in four volumes, with flexible backs and beautifully 
 printed, in which she had written on a fly-leaf, with 
 a much clearer comprehension of me than I had, 
 "An antidote for an overdose of Matthew Arnold." 
 Indeed my state of mind about Arnold was pretty 
 manifest to anybody. I once quoted to James Had- 
 ley one of Arnold's critical remarks. Hadley, with 
 his wide reading, fine intelligence and ripe experi 
 ence, was not subject to a belief in anybody's in 
 fallibility. He at once appreciated my state of mind 
 and said, "Oh, well, it's like any other clever thing." 
 I suppose young men in this country are, or were,
 
 Autobiographical Notes 61 
 
 particularly susceptible to such influence from 
 European writers an inheritance perhaps of our 
 Colonial existence. But you will see the same thing 
 in the older countries as well. Carlyle seemed to have 
 some such effect on people in the thirties and forties, 
 both here and in England. It was not only the silly 
 women about in London literary society, who were 
 talking and writing his lingo all over the place, but 
 you are surprised to find such a man as Clough so 
 occupied, if I may judge from letters of his I have 
 seen. What is the good of having Clough's culture 
 and reading, if one is to be at the mercy of some per 
 son with a marked genius and a strong will who 
 happens to come along? Clough must have read 
 enough and thought enough to know that, after all 
 that has been said in the world, it is unlikely that 
 any one man can have something new to tell us which 
 is so very important. As regards myself it is per 
 haps true that, without knowing it, I had acquired 
 a warm personal liking for Arnold, the result no 
 doubt of a natural sympathy. Years afterwards 
 I published in London a book of essays in which I 
 had a paper on Arnold, written when I was young. 
 I asked one of his nieces to say to him that if he saw 
 the book anywhere, I hoped he would not read what 
 I had said about him. In a few days I got a letter 
 from him in which he said that he heard I did not 
 wish him to read what I had written about him, and 
 that he straightway had read it, and that he thought 
 it very kind. 
 
 I went out to spend a night in Arnold's house in 
 Surrey. It was a dull, damp evening in November. 
 He sent a trap and pony to meet me at the station, 
 from which it was a drive of two or three miles to his
 
 62 A Virginian Village 
 
 house. I didn't know the drive was to be so long, 
 and I had not worn a heavy overcoat, so that by the 
 time I reached the house I was chilled through. 
 Before I got out of the trap, the tall figure of the 
 poet appeared at the door. He called out, "Have 
 you brought the fish?" I knew nothing about fish, 
 and was too nearly chilled through to care for such 
 matters. He said, "Well, if you haven't brought 
 the fish, you won't have any for dinner." When I 
 got out of the trap, he quickly saw the state I was 
 in and said, "You poor fellow, you look almost dead 
 with cold." Some hot tea was quickly brought me, 
 and in the company of his wife and daughters I was 
 very happy in a few minutes. The younger of 
 Arnold's daughters had just prepared a birthday book 
 of her father's poetry. In this book there was a quo 
 tation from Arnold's poems for each day of the year. 
 We looked up my birthday, which is the thirteenth 
 of February. The quotation for that date happened 
 to be very pat to my condition as a single man, which 
 made the young ladies laugh. 
 
 Later they had in some neighbors to dinner, who 
 were interested in, and anxious about, the success of 
 Arnold's lectures in this country. He was shortly to 
 sail for this country with his wife and daughter. At 
 breakfast the next morning I was telling them about 
 my friend, Charles de Kay, whose poetry I thought 
 the best written by any of the younger American poets 
 of that day. I said that he had just published 
 a volume of poems, all about one young lady. At 
 that Arnold's countenance assumed a quizzical ex 
 pression, and I thought of the Marguerite of his 
 own poems. I don't think anything is known of 
 the identity of this lady, except that she was French.
 
 Autobiographical Notes 63 
 
 I am in a position to make one contribution to her 
 history, however. A certain friend of Arnold's 
 once told me that she had often teased Arnold to 
 find out who she was, but that she had only been 
 able to get from him this detail, that she had a way 
 of walking up and down the floor with her hands in 
 her pockets. 
 
 Arnold drove me to the station with the trap and 
 pony the next morning. Arnold would get out and 
 walk up the hills leading the pony and would say to 
 me, screwing up his face in a way peculiar to him, 
 "Oh, don't you get out," as if I would have stayed 
 in. I didn't tell him the story they tell in Kentucky 
 about a certain Green Clay, a noted horseman of 
 that country. In that horse-loving country, the 
 custom was to get off a horse at the bottom of a hill 
 and lead the horse up and then remount at the top. 
 Green Clay never did this, but remained in the 
 saddle all the way up hill. When asked why he 
 failed to conform to the general practice in this par 
 ticular, he replied that there were many horses in 
 the world, but only one Green Clay. Arnold went 
 up to town with me. As we were waiting for the 
 train at a forlorn station, we talked about poetry. 
 Everyone knows what a fine gift he had for naming 
 literary qualities. He said that Bryant's "Water 
 fowl" was "beautifully carried." He said, how 
 ever, that our people made too much of inferior 
 poetry, of which he implied that Bryant had written 
 a good deal. 
 
 Parke Godwin, Bryant's son-in-law, told me that 
 Arnold, when in this country, had told him this in 
 cident. Hartley Coleridge once said to Arnold that 
 he had just read one of the most beautiful poems
 
 64 A Virginian Village 
 
 he had ever read. "Something of your father's, I 
 suppose," said Arnold. "No," he said, "my father 
 never wrote anything so beautiful. It is by an 
 American poet." It was the "Waterfowl." 
 
 I went to stay with some people who lived about 
 two miles from him, and who were friends of his. 
 One Sunday afternoon, I walked over to see him 
 and he walked back with me. I had just printed 
 a book of essays, which a good many of the Eng 
 lish critics had not liked. He said he thought the 
 criticisms showed a feeling against me as an Ameri 
 can. He said, "You said some queer things about 
 me. You said I was truculent." I replied that I 
 meant that he had that courage of a young man. 
 "Yes," he said, "I knew what you meant." I 
 would often see Arnold in company in London, or 
 sometimes in the street, and have a few minutes' 
 talk with him. Later I saw a good deal of him in 
 this country. I never was so fond of any man I 
 knew so little. 
 
 I doubt if there is any period of life so generally 
 pleasant as that from thirty-five to forty. At that 
 age a man has all the advantages of youth, and he 
 has all the sense he ever will have. At that time of 
 my life I was in the foreign service. I should much 
 rather have been at home, but that I did not seem to 
 be able to accomplish. I was home once for three 
 months during that time, and I greatly enjoyed that 
 visit. I remember with particular pleasure the 
 weeks I spent in Washington. It was then a very 
 different place from what it is now. The "Cave 
 Dwellers" were still in control of it. There were 
 scarcely any very rich people; the people lived 
 mostly in small houses. One of the pleasantest
 
 Autobiographical Notes 65 
 
 houses was that of two unmarried ladies, who were 
 at home on Sunday evenings, and where you would 
 find in two rooms on the ground floor the best com 
 pany in the town. I think the most important 
 house at that time in Washington was the British 
 Legation. The British Minister was Sir Edward 
 Thornton. I knew him and his family very well. I 
 was there one night to dinner, when there was also 
 there a distinguished historian who lived in Wash 
 ington and who had one of the pleasantest houses in 
 the place, a tall, slender, handsome man, who, al 
 though very old, was still erect and in good preserva 
 tion. I remember at the table Miss Thornton spoke 
 of "an old man." "What do you call an old man?" 
 asked the historian. "Ninety," said Miss Thorn 
 ton discreetly. "Perhaps that will do," the his 
 torian said thoughtfully. I told him that Mr. 
 Lowell had given me a letter to him, and he told me 
 to call at his house the next day and that he would 
 introduce me to his wife. Accordingly I called and 
 was shown into a room where there were a number 
 of people. The historian said to his wife: "This is 
 the young gentleman whom I met at the Thorntons' 
 last night." The lady took one of my hands in 
 each of hers and led me to a little sofa, and we sat 
 there talking, she still holding my hands in hers and 
 working them up and down as one does with a baby. 
 She then dropped one of my hands and, taking the 
 other in both of hers, dandled it up and down and 
 patted it, talking all the time in praise of England. 
 I thought "You're a funny old lady, but you seem 
 to like me, which is an indication that you have 
 good judgment." But I could not understand why 
 she should be praising England so much. Presently
 
 66 A Virginian Village 
 
 I saw what was in her mind. She thought that I 
 was a new man who had been sent out to Sir Edward 
 Thornton. I said: "But I'm not an Englishman; 
 I'm an American secretary in London." At this 
 she sat bolt upright and assumed a very stern ex 
 pression of countenance and dropped my hand as if 
 it were a hot potato evidently angry with me be 
 cause she had made herself ridiculous. I never 
 forgot the incident. It gave me a new idea of the 
 kind of treatment an Englishman gets in this country. 
 Some days afterwards I called at the house in the 
 evening, when I saw the other side of her. I found 
 her sitting alone with the historian. The old his 
 torian was asleep most of the time, but he would 
 now and then wake up and assent with great energy 
 to something he hadn't heard. Of course we talked 
 about England, where he had formerly been min 
 ister. I was talking as if I were not quite a cipher 
 in London, when the lady said that, when they were 
 in London, the secretary of the legation did not go 
 into society. I thought that pretty rude; so I said 
 "Perhaps not as secretary of legation, but he can do 
 like anybody else; he can go to balls and take down 
 old ladies to supper and work along in that way until 
 he can do something better." It was not quite so 
 smartly turned as that; that is perhaps more the 
 way one would have thought to say it the day after. 
 But I said something of the kind, and the old his 
 torian, who happened to wake up about that time, I 
 thought looked at me with some respect. She asked 
 me to come to an evening party at her house, which 
 was to be given a few evenings later. I went, and 
 thought it one of the pleasantest parties I ever was 
 at. There were a number of very nice people at
 
 Autobiographical Notes 67 
 
 that time in Washington. The society was small 
 but it was pleasant and they were all together. Now 
 I am told it is much larger and broken up into sets. 
 
 My publishers tell me that these reminiscences 
 must stop. It was a dangerous experiment, giving 
 an old man carte blanche to talk about his young 
 days.
 
 A VIRGINIAN MOUNTAIN VILLAGE 
 
 I DESIRE to give a sketch of a little slave-holding 
 community which I knew as a boy. This was to be 
 found in the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia. It 
 was a peculiar community, unlike other parts of the 
 South and particularly old Virginia. In race the peo 
 ple were Scotch Irish; in religion they were Presby 
 terians; their occupations were mainly pastoral. The 
 region was an isolated one. At the time of which I 
 am speaking there was not a railroad within a hun 
 dred miles. The roads were rough and bad, so that 
 people used carriages very little. The common way 
 of getting about for men and even for women was on 
 horseback. The women rode to church on horseback. 
 But the people of the country, notwithstanding their 
 isolation and their primitive habits, lived in great 
 comfort and even with a considerable degree of re 
 finement. The better or richer sort lived, either on 
 their farms or in the village, in the two-story double 
 brick houses, with a hall through the middle, which 
 are to be seen throughout that country. 
 
 The neighborhood, at the time of which I am now 
 speaking, say, 1855 to 1860, was considerably less 
 than a century old. It was settled about the time of 
 the Revolution and up to near the beginning of the 
 present century had been at war with the Indians. 
 The first settlers were Scotch-Irish Presbyterian 
 farmers, who in the century that followed the Battle 
 of the Boyne had been driven from Ireland by British 
 ingratitude and persecution. They came to the usual
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 69 
 
 life of the American frontier. For protection against 
 the Shawnees, they lived at first in fortified places. 
 As the Indians withdrew, they scattered throughout 
 the country. The log cabin succeeded the fort, and 
 the frame house succeeded the log cabin. At a very 
 early period they built a stone church, singularly 
 spacious and handsome, in part with the labor of 
 their own hands. The community prospered rapidly. 
 They raised good horses and cattle and got good 
 prices for them. This country, Greenbrier County, 
 as it is called, being a blue-grass country, had in 
 former days a reputation for the breeding of good 
 stock similar to that which the blue-grass region of 
 Kentucky now has. In 1811 a young married couple 
 started on their wedding journey on horseback. The 
 horse which the lady rode was valued at $800, a 
 great sum for that time and place. That their stock 
 could bring such prices shows how well the people 
 must have thriven. They built the comely brick 
 houses of which I have spoken. Then the honey 
 suckle vines grew at the porches, and the humming 
 birds came and quivered before them. Within the 
 pianos began to jingle to such pieces as the "Bird 
 Waltz" and the "Downfall of Paris." The fashions 
 were brought from Philadelphia. Under the new 
 secure conditions, affectation and vanity began also 
 to flourish. Pride, too, came in, and the descendants 
 of the pious peasants, who, two or three generations 
 before, had been content by their labor and courage 
 to obtain bread from the soil and immunity from the 
 tomahawk of the savage, now began to entertain 
 mythical suggestions of a genteel ancestry. Social 
 gradations and distinctions began to be recognized. 
 A court house was built. A few white stones gathered
 
 7O A Virginian Village 
 
 in the village churchyard. As day by day the sun 
 sprang with youthful strength into the morning 
 heavens, he saw to expand beneath his beams the 
 joys, the virtues, the follies, and the refinements of a 
 civilized society. 
 
 Such undoubtedly had been the history of the 
 little community. But one who saw it as I did got 
 no notion of this change and progress. It seemed 
 always to have been just what it was then. The 
 quiet of the place was profound. At noon perhaps 
 the only figure within sight would be a woman in a 
 sun-bonnet crossing the blazing street on a visit 
 to a neighbor. But this repose was not dilapidated 
 and shabby, as I imagine that of certain parts of 
 the South to have been, but was, as I remember it, 
 happy and golden. The people worked hard enough 
 for comfort and competence, although not as people 
 work at the North. There was not much mental 
 activity of any sort among them. They had but few 
 books, but they were good. They read that is, 
 if they read at all the "Spectator" and Scott and 
 the Standard English authors. The poet most in fa 
 vor with these Presbyterian young ladies was the 
 libertine and sceptic, Byron. It may be that Mrs. 
 Felicia Hemans had also a few readers. 
 
 Perhaps I can best give you an idea of this village 
 by describing some of its individual members and 
 social customs. The doctor was an interesting and 
 characteristic person. He was an old Virginian; and 
 from my knowledge of him I can well understand 
 that the people of the Valley and of the West were 
 different from the people east of the Blue Ridge, for 
 he was unlike the thrifty and prosaic people of Green- 
 brier. He was a graduate of William and Mary
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 71 
 
 College and had studied law. In company with two 
 friends he had started westward on horseback to 
 seek his fortune, as was the custom of those days. 
 They stopped over Sunday in the Village, and went 
 to the Presbyterian church, and there this young 
 gentleman saw a countenance which decided his 
 career. From this accidental church-going came a 
 life passed among the valleys of Greenbrier. The 
 family of the young lady who was the possessor of 
 the countenance just referred to made rather hard 
 conditions. It seems there were more lawyers than 
 were needed in the connection, but it was thought 
 there was room for a physician. With old Virginian 
 facility these conditions were accepted, and the young 
 man went back to college and studied medicine. 
 It may be remarked that in those days the prepara 
 tion for a profession was not so serious a matter as at 
 present. It thus happened that a man intended by 
 nature for politics and the forum spent his days 
 pacing along the mountain roads, his saddle-bags 
 filled with little phials containing calomel and jalap, 
 by means of which I do not doubt that he visited 
 upon the inhabitants of that region the grudge he 
 never ceased to bear against the Scotch-Irish guile 
 that had robbed him of his proper career. The doc 
 tor had to the full an old Virginian's contempt of 
 people west of the Blue Ridge, but he was neverthe 
 less popular throughout that country. Tall, erect, 
 sarcastic, irascible, frank, indolent, and generous, 
 he had qualities to win men's affection. He was the 
 clever man of the neighborhood. If a speech was to 
 be made, he was called upon to make it. It was only 
 upon occasions of this kind that he could be said to 
 live. It was he who made the speech at the Fourth
 
 72 A Virginian Village 
 
 of July celebration. This anniversary was celebrated 
 in a grove upon the top of an adjacent hill, a kind of 
 arboreal Acropolis or natural temple, in which were 
 held at long intervals the village festivals and civic 
 assemblies. This grove, unlike more Northern wood 
 lands, was clear of undergrowth, the tall columns 
 standing in the midst of a clean, green floor. The 
 Sunday Schools on that day came in a body to the 
 wood and composed the audience, the grown people 
 looking on. It was a pretty sight, quite like a scene 
 in the Opera, to see the little procession of children 
 of five years old and upward in their best Sunday 
 clothes, carrying banners with such customary de 
 vices as a cross, or a lamb, or a shepherd with a crook, 
 march in under the vast oaks, while the overhanging 
 mountains looked on. Seats for the children were 
 made by laying planks over stakes driven into the 
 \ ground. A long, rude table, laid with a white cloth 
 and plates and glasses, and having on either side 
 benches also made from plank, waited during the 
 morning ceremonies. A platform was extemporized 
 for the orator, which also gave seats to two or three 
 ministers and a few of the great men. The Declara 
 tion of Independence was read. The American flag 
 was exhibited; they thought of no other in those 
 days. The orator was the doctor. This was the one 
 occasion of the year when he could free his mind. 
 He mounted the platform and made a political 
 speech. For two full hours he harangued those little 
 girls in white dresses and pink sashes on the crimes 
 of the Whig party and the mysterious villanies of 
 the Know-nothings, while the dryads lurking in the 
 recesses of the forest were astonished by such un 
 wonted dissonances as the "Wilmot Proviso," the
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 73 
 
 "Missouri Compromise" and the "Resolutions of 
 Nullification." On the platform behind the speaker 
 were the leading men. The Presbyterian clergyman 
 had at that time been some fifty years at the stone 
 church below, so that his ministry must have been 
 almost contemporaneous with the occupation of the 
 country. He had married pretty much the entire 
 population, had christened their children, and buried 
 their fathers. He could remember some of the first 
 inhabitants of the region, and must have known 
 personally the occupants of the oldest and wildest 
 of the churchyard hillocks. He was a stately and 
 handsome old man, of great authority with the peo 
 ple. He sat with his hands crossed upon his cane, and 
 looked upon the violence of the orator with a per 
 plexed and slightly fatigued air, but at the same time 
 with an expression of dignified patience and a mild 
 majesty like that of the mountain opposite, whose 
 head had just caught the sun. The Methodist min 
 ister, a much younger man, of a very argumentative 
 disposition and a strong Know-nothing, cast his eyes 
 up among the branches of the trees, and by pan 
 tomime and by-play of one sort or another, conveyed 
 to the audience his superior dissent from the views 
 of the orator. 
 
 It might be thought that this long speech would 
 have been hard upon the children. But my recol 
 lection is that it was not. It happened that the orator 
 had a great gift for making faces. These grimaces of 
 his were the wonder of the neighborhood and a 
 source of comment throughout that country, where 
 jokes were comparatively few. They were looked on 
 as distinctions, in some way connected with the 
 orator's mental superiorities. His own boys, who were
 
 74 A Virginian Village 
 
 my cousins, gave themselves a great deal of swagger 
 on account of them. In company with some of the 
 other boys, we used to get possession of seats upon 
 the front bench, where we were under the nose of the 
 speaker; and as grimace succeeded grimace, each 
 more hideous than its predecessor, we would nudge 
 each other with pretended derision, but in reality 
 with secret pride; for was it not our father and uncle 
 whose contortions of countenance thus fascinated 
 the infant gaze of Greenbrier County? 
 
 The part which this gentleman took in the war 
 may be worth mentioning, as it illustrates the action 
 of many thousands of Southern men. At this time 
 I doubt if he had ever thought of secession as a 
 thing possible in his day. I shall presently try to 
 explain how this transition came to the minds of men 
 of the border states. It is true, however, that he was 
 during the war a very thorough and effective rebel. 
 For the first time in his career he seemed to have 
 found a task to his liking. Just previous to the out 
 break of the war, he had been paralyzed and had been 
 compelled to give up his practice. He was unable 
 to move from his chair. But he went into the work 
 of raising the country with the greatest ardor. He 
 got possession of the village paper, filled it with 
 inflammatory articles, and scattered the little fire 
 brand throughout the adjacent country. He had 
 himself carried in his chair to the steps of the Court 
 House, from which he would deliver passionate ha 
 rangues to the people, who were very fond and proud 
 of him. The country soon became a debatable 
 ground between the two armies. But he was not on 
 this account the less energetic. The Federal Provost- 
 Marshal made many attempts to quiet him, but
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 75 
 
 to no purpose. On one occasion this officer came 
 with an orderly or two to his house and threatened 
 to kill him in case he gave further trouble. This 
 menace greatly surprised the doctor. "Kill me," he 
 said, "why, my good friend, look at me. I am not 
 able to get out of this chair and never shall be. I 
 can't move hand or foot. I am fed with a spoon. 
 What do you suppose I care for life? If you wish 
 to kill me, you are at liberty to shoot away as quick 
 as you like." The Provost-Marshal gave him up 
 and went away. 
 
 This gentleman was, as I knew him, an erect and 
 vigorous man. I remember well the old gray pacer 
 upon which he moved among those peaceful valleys, 
 his mind, I doubt not, often occupied with thoughts 
 of his disappointed ambitions. He was a connection 
 of my own and a great friend of my childhood. As 
 he will never have an opportunity to appear before 
 so distinguished an audience as the present one, I 
 think I ought to say that I believe he really was a 
 clever man. 
 
 The community I have been describing was, not 
 withstanding its many points of dissimilarity to the 
 rest of the South, thoroughly Southern. Like the 
 South, it was hospitable. The houses of the people, 
 particularly those in the country, were often filled 
 with parties of young people. The community was, 
 in its own way, like the South in general, aristocratic. 
 Mistaken notions have been held in regard to the 
 aristocratic condition of Southern society. One of 
 these is that the planters lived with a degree of state 
 and luxury. This I imagine to be a mistake. This 
 way of living existed in a few localities, but was not 
 general. Manners as a rule were simple. But it is
 
 76 A Virginian Village 
 
 not to be supposed that, because Southern society 
 had not the refinement of living which has been 
 ascribed to it, it was not therefore aristocratic. All 
 that is necessary to make a society aristocratic is 
 that certain of its members shall be recognized by 
 their neighbors to be superior to certain others. This 
 was true of the South. It was true of the Greenbrier 
 people. I think that even the little boys with whom 
 I played had a feeling that certain of their number 
 were on the score of birth distinctly superior to cer 
 tain others. Yet our manners and customs were not 
 very distinguished. We all went bare-footed. No 
 boy under fifteen, from May till the winter set in, 
 wore shoes and stockings. The dress of the boys con 
 sisted of a shirt, perhaps a jacket, possibly a single 
 suspender, a pair of trousers in a state of integrity 
 more or less complete, and a straw hat, usually torn 
 at the brim. They got scarcely any learning and went 
 very little to school. Their time was mostly passed 
 sitting on the steps of the village stores or in hunting 
 the ground-squirrel, a little animal resembling a 
 chipmunk. The boys laid aside social distinctions 
 when in pursuit of this quarry. The hunt took place 
 in the grove upon an adjoining hill which has been 
 described and was participated in by all the boys 
 of the village from six to twelve years of age. The 
 sport began while the morning was yet fresh and the 
 shadows long. After a breakfast of coffee, ham, 
 corn pone, and hot salt-rising the easy-going people 
 allowed the children to eat anything they sallied 
 forth to the wood. The little darkies came too. 
 Every boy was accompanied by a cur of some de 
 scription, which, with his tail curled over his back, 
 stepped about full of the day's occupations. The
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 77 
 
 larger boys issued their loud commands, and the 
 lesser boys ran hither and thither with a great 
 sense of the importance of the occasion. The hunt 
 continued throughout the morning hours. The 
 sylvan scene was vocal with the excitement of the 
 pursuit. Commerce slept in the little mart at the 
 foot of the hill and Justice dozed in the quiet Court 
 House; but the wood above rang with the shouts of 
 the youthful hunters, and every urchin and pick 
 aninny and village cur and mongrel joined the cry 
 and added to the tumult. The sport was, however, 
 not altogether confined to the boys. There was, I 
 remember, one little Amazon, a girl of perhaps eight 
 summers, who, in sun-bonnet and with flying curls, 
 sped along among the foremost of the pursuers, and 
 whom I can fancy exclaiming like an infant Hip- 
 polyta : 
 
 I was with Hercules and Cadmus once 
 When in a wood of Crete, they bay'd the bear 
 With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear 
 Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves, 
 The skies, the fountains, every region near 
 Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard 
 So musical a discord, such sweet thunder. 
 
 I have said that the doctor did not imagine five 
 years before the war that secession would be possible 
 in his day. I am sure that at this time nobody spoke 
 or thought of secession. That was true, not only of 
 this region, but of all Virginia up to the outbreak 
 of the war. At the time Virginia went out of the 
 Union, I doubt if one man in a hundred was really 
 in favor of secession. 
 
 The incidents I am here describing took place
 
 78 A Virginian Village 
 
 during a summer I passed in this country in 1854. I 
 was again in this country, and in other parts of Vir 
 ginia, in 1857 and 1858. The interval I had passed in 
 the West and I returned to Virginia an ardent oppo 
 nent of slavery. I had thus good opportunities of 
 knowing what the people were thinking, better, I dare 
 say, than if I had been older. People would put up 
 with talk from a boy of fourteen, which they would 
 not have permitted from a grown man, and would 
 discuss subjects with him they would not ordinarily 
 have discussed with a person of a different way of 
 thinking. 
 
 Anyone living in the South at that time and dis 
 liking slavery was in an unusual situation. I don't 
 think I knew in Virginia more than two or three 
 persons who were opposed to slavery, and they never 
 expressed their views. One of these was my father. 
 He was ready to make sacrifices for his opinions. 
 A very poor man, he freed some slaves that had come 
 to us after the death of a relation, thinking it wrong 
 to own slaves. But he scarcely ever spoke of the 
 subject and was careful to impress upon me the 
 necessity of holding my tongue. Of course, I knew 
 what his feelings were, but I can at this moment 
 recall only one instance of his referring to them. 
 We were riding single file along a bridle path on the 
 top of the Alleghenies, the green floor of the Valley 
 of Virginia, dotted here and there with farms and 
 villages, spread out some thousands of feet beneath 
 us, when we met an old negro riding a mule and going 
 in the opposite direction. He bowed his head very 
 low as he passed us and said, with great humbleness, 
 "Sarvant, Sah." My father said: "Did you notice 
 that? You write 'Your obedient servant' at the
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 79 
 
 end of a letter, but that is merely a form of civility; 
 but that a man should say it, really meaning it, how 
 dreadful that is!" But I doubt if my father would 
 have said even this, if we had not been at such a 
 distance from the world, with the haunts of men so 
 far beneath our feet. 
 
 If there was a community which should have 
 been inaccessible to secession it was this. In external 
 things it had little in common with the South. Of 
 course, it raised no cotton or sugar or even tobacco. 
 It had very little agriculture of any kind. Owing 
 to its great altitude the village is 2,300 feet above 
 the sea the thermometer will, on winter nights, 
 sometimes fall to 25 below zero. The Scotch-Irish 
 Presbyterians were very nearly akin to Puritans. 
 In the stone church was preached a Calvinism as un 
 compromising as that to be heard in any white temple 
 among the hills of New Hampshire. Slavery, else 
 where the one vigorous and aggressive institution of 
 the South, existed in an exceedingly mild form here. 
 The richer people did not have more than twenty- 
 five or thirty slaves. These slaves were treated 
 with kindness, as I can well remember. The old 
 Virginians looked down upon the stock-breeders 
 and drovers of the mountains, but there was one 
 point at which the mountaineers considered them 
 selves superior to the old Virginians; they were 
 more humane masters. Cruelty to slaves was an 
 offense treated with grave social reprobation. I 
 remember that a man was dismissed from the Meth 
 odist church for beating a slave. A slave was 
 rarely sold. In my own connection, I believe it 
 happened in but a single case. About 1840, a man 
 who had committed a number of crimes was sold
 
 8o A Virginian Village 
 
 South. For a quarter of a century afterward this 
 incident was still talked of as something very re 
 markable. Such were the points of difference be 
 tween this region and the rest of the South. Yet 
 notwithstanding all these points of dissimilarity 
 to the South, when secession came, this country 
 seceded too. 
 
 Of course the ultimate reason of secession was that 
 there was "an irrepressible conflict" between the 
 two systems of slave labor and free labor. As Lin 
 coln said, "The country must either be all free or all 
 slave," or, as Calhoun said twenty years earlier, 
 the Southern people could not long continue to live 
 side by side with the Northern people under the same 
 government if the Northern people believed the in 
 stitution in which their existence was bound up to be 
 wicked. The rationale of the irrepressible conflict 
 idea was as follows: The North said that slavery 
 was wrong; the South replied at first mildly but 
 apologetically. The North expressed itself more 
 strongly; the South expressed itself more angrily. 
 The two public sentiments kept reacting upon and 
 intensifying each other, with the certainty that in 
 the end war or separation, or both, must result. 
 Such was the ultimate and fundamental cause of 
 secession. But I should like to say something of the 
 manner in which secession came, to describe the 
 mental characteristics of the Southern people, as I 
 knew them, just previous to the war. 
 
 From my recollection of the South in those days 
 my belief is that the chief mental characteristic 
 of the South was that it had lost the power of dis 
 cussion and discrimination. The more conservative 
 people were unable to say, "no" to the propositions
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 81 
 
 of the more extreme people. I remember one after 
 noon in the House of Representatives in the winter 
 of '59-60 the atmosphere, of course, highly charged 
 with excitement, the gaily dressed Southern ladies 
 in the galleries applauding with gloved hands, the 
 poor creatures so soon to be face to face with the 
 manifold miseries and obscurities of war hearing 
 the late J. L. M. Curry, a very fine orator, exclaim 
 with ringing voice: "We at the South are not in the 
 habit of distinguishing between the various shades 
 of opposition to our institutions." They had in 
 truth lost the power to distinguish and to discrimi 
 nate. Regarding the slavery question itself, it was 
 inevitable that it must soon reach a point at which it 
 was impossible to discuss it. The chief reason of this 
 impossibility was that it would not do that slavery 
 should be talked of in the presence of slaves. The 
 slaves would overhear. Not that the Southern peo 
 ple consciously feared the slaves. During my 
 years of residence at the South I do not remember 
 to have heard the mention of the phrase "servile 
 insurrection" or of any equivalent expression. It 
 was too dreadful a contingency to be taken into 
 consideration at all, to be talked about or even 
 thought of. But nevertheless they could not bear 
 that the negro should become in the most remote 
 way a party to the controversy. 
 
 Another reason of the impossibility of discussion 
 was the bitter pride with which the Southern people 
 resented the accusations of the opponents of slavery. 
 If they could have discussed it, they might have 
 got rid of it. Mr. George Merriam has lately asked 
 why the South could not have abolished slavery, as 
 the South American Republics did. I don't know
 
 82 A Virginian Village 
 
 anything about South America, but were there any 
 Fanueil Halls or Exeter Halls there? Anglo-Saxon 
 human nature being such as it is, could the Southern 
 people have been expected, under the fire of accusa 
 tions from their critics, to set about and adhere to 
 some orderly plan of emancipation? If they had 
 been a community of sages, perhaps yes, but not 
 otherwise. 
 
 The same inability of discussion which the South 
 had shown regarding slavery, it still exhibited when 
 secession was proposed. For many years Southern 
 pro-slavery opinion had been advancing from point 
 to point. It had always been easy to move in this 
 direction. But it was hard to oppose a step in ad 
 vance, because opposition necessitated discussion, 
 and discussion was impossible. So when secession 
 was at last proposed, it was as difficult to resist this 
 final step as it had been to resist any of the previous 
 ones. A most striking and important feature of the 
 situation, by the way, was that the individual be 
 came very much afraid of the mass. Everybody was 
 afraid of what everybody else was thinking. The 
 temptation of each man was to adopt the most 
 violent language and to favor the most extreme 
 measures, in order to convince his neighbors that he 
 thought as they did. Thus the more extreme posi 
 tion always attracted the people away from the less 
 extreme one. I may mention the case of Mr. Lamar. 
 Mr. Lamar did not want secession. He went to the 
 Mississippi convention, hoping there would be no 
 secession, and at any rate, intending, if the State 
 did secede, to favor a clause providing that the 
 ordinance should take effect only after nine States 
 had seceded. The result was that the convention
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 83 
 
 seceded outright and made Mr. Lamar draw up the 
 ordinance of secession. This is exactly an illustration 
 of what I am saying. The man who wished to make 
 secession contingent upon the action of nine States 
 could oppose no effective resistance to the man who 
 wished to secede outright. Secession once started, 
 community after community and individual after 
 individual went down like a row of bricks that had 
 been set falling. I say, therefore, that my recollec 
 tion is that the South seceded because there was no 
 body who could say "no." 
 
 Regarding the widespread fear to which I have 
 just alluded, I fancy that this has been characteristic 
 of many popular movements in history. It was no 
 doubt so in France during the French Revolution. 
 The people who, all over France, bought little toy 
 guillotines for their children were probably not more 
 cruel than the generality of human beings, but fear 
 compelled them to be in the movement. 
 
 The desire of the individual to express sentiments 
 of the mass, I may here say, is still to be observed in 
 the South. The feeling of the Southern whites 
 against the negro, particularly among those with 
 whom the negro is in competition, is, of course, only 
 too real. But you will nevertheless often notice 
 that the Southern people, in expressing unfriendly 
 sentiments regarding the negro, are expressing less 
 their own views than what they believe to be those of 
 the rest of the community. 
 
 This individual and social fear was associated with 
 a blind arrogance and rashness which is, I believe, 
 likely to be found among slave-holding populations, 
 and which was also a contributing cause of secession. 
 Of this arrogance I have lately come across a curious
 
 84 A Virginian Village 
 
 example. In a life of James M. Mason, Confederate 
 envoy in London during the Civil War, it is related 
 that the English friends of the Confederacy wished 
 to obtain from the Confederate Government a dec 
 laration that, in case of Confederate success, no 
 attempt would be made to open the African slave 
 trade. One would have thought that such a dec 
 laration would be made as a matter of course. On 
 the contrary, the Confederate Government vigor 
 ously objected to doing this. They said that the 
 Confederate Constitution contained a provision 
 against the African slave trade, which the United 
 States Constitution did not contain. But the Eng 
 lishmen insisted: "Why then not make the declara 
 tion?" There could have been but one reason for 
 such hesitation, which was that there was in the 
 Gulf States a party, which the Confederate Govern 
 ment could not afford to offend the Confederacy 
 being professedly a rope of sand, it could afford to 
 offend nobody a party that wished to reopen the 
 slave trade. There was a party in those States that 
 really believed it was possible to carry on such 
 traffic in the face of the opposition, not only of the 
 North, but of the whole civilized world, and to do this 
 across great stretches of sea, patrolled by the navies 
 of the most powerful nations. 
 
 Another characteristic of the beginnings of seces 
 sion was a marked tone of levity. This levity was 
 noticeable during the winter of '60-6 1 all over the 
 country, in the North as well as in the South. It was 
 very natural that this should affect the men of the 
 border states. The Union to which they had been 
 devotedly attached was at an end. What hope could 
 a Virginian, who preferred the Union, find in a civil
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 85 
 
 war of doubtful result, which was waged against the 
 social organization to which he belonged? It was 
 owing to this hopelessness that he accepted with 
 reckless levity the action of the South. 
 
 I think I have said enough to show why my uncle, 
 who in 1854 and in 1857 was a strong Union man, 
 should have been in 1861 an ardent secessionist. 
 
 It was not till a good many years after the war 
 that I saw this old home of mine again. In the ante 
 bellum days it took two days of staging from the 
 nearest railway station to reach the place. I had 
 always thought of it as accessible only after many 
 miles of valley and mountain road had been trav 
 ersed. But since then the railroad has applied its rule 
 of thumb to these prepossessions of the fancy and has 
 demonstrated that it is not so far away after all. I 
 was surprised one morning to find myself sitting upon 
 a certain rose-embowered porch, reading the New 
 York paper of the day previous. The railroad has 
 left the village, which was fifty years ago the metrop 
 olis of that entire region, six miles to the South. 
 This distance I was driven in a stage along a moun 
 tain road, bordered by the tall, clean boles of lofty 
 oak and hickory, and catching now and again glimp 
 ses of the Greenbrier River shining amid the profuse 
 shrubbery of that part of the world. I may be 
 speaking with the pride of a native, but the scenery 
 seems to me the most beautiful I know. Its char 
 acter is that of a mountain Kentucky. You see the 
 classic woodlands of Kentucky and you find blue- 
 grass growing on the tops of mountains 3,500 feet 
 high. It is the blue-grass which gives the country its 
 deep coloring. Agricultural and pastoral fertility is 
 to my mind an element of beauty; that this country
 
 86 A Virginian Village 
 
 has. The mountain scenery of New England and 
 New York has its own sterner beauty, but not that. 
 The characteristics of New England mountain 
 scenery are replaced in Pennsylvania on the Sus- 
 quehanna by a smiling vernal freshness; and this is 
 again succeeded among the West Virginian moun 
 tains by strength of hue, which I have scarcely ever 
 seen equalled. You see everywhere a dense, sub 
 stantial verdure. A profound bloom of summer 
 imbues and impregnates the entire landscape. 
 
 The village had changed much. I did not see the 
 golden quiet and repose of the former age. The town 
 seemed to be undergoing a slow recovery from a long 
 period of decay. The Presbyterian church was the 
 same clean and serious structure I remembered, a 
 remarkably substantial and handsome building to 
 have dated from 1790. I found this inscription 
 rudely sketched upon one of the stones of the edifice: 
 "This building was erected by some of the first in 
 habitants of this region to commemorate their faith 
 in the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ." An acre of 
 white stones surrounds the church. From the pews 
 from which the village doctor and the young lady 
 of Greenbrier first looked at each other, you may now 
 see through the windows their tombstones, side by 
 side with a taller one, upon which the bereaved pair 
 lament in accents of sharp grief the loss of an only 
 daughter. The graves in the churchyard seemed to 
 have suffered from the dilapidation to which the 
 town had succumbed. The older graves are very 
 wild and are overrun with masses of blue-grass and 
 tangled wild roses and strawberry vines, which wave 
 amid the sanctity and the quiet of the place. I spent 
 an hour or two of the only morning I had to pass in
 
 A Virginian Mountain Village 87 
 
 the village, under the lambent blue of the June sky, 
 putting aside the rank grasses and spelling out my 
 kinship to the occupants of the sod. A burial ground 
 for the slaves, within the same enclosure, but sepa 
 rate from that of the whites, seemed in this last scene 
 of the mortal career to invoke the forbearance of 
 Heaven upon the prejudices of men. I climbed also 
 to the top of a round and lofty hill overlooking the 
 village, the crest of which had been taken during the 
 war as a burial place for soldiers on either side who 
 fell here. This spot, containing perhaps a dozen 
 graves surrounded by a stone wall, is visited by the 
 people on summer evenings; here has been laid some 
 Confederate who perished at a distance from his 
 home or some Northern boy who fell by the roadside. 
 Lifted high above the village, it stands now in the 
 midst of the silence and the verdure which reign 
 throughout that country, a monument of forgotten 
 strife in what we may hope to be a land of peace.
 
 SOUTHERN LITERATURE 
 
 I LIVED as a boy in the South for some time 
 just before the outbreak of the Civil War, and 
 from what I saw my belief is that one cause of se 
 cession was the fear which the Southern individual 
 had of the opinion of the rest of the community. It 
 seems to me that this fear was also the ultimate 
 cause of the inferiority of Southern antebellum liter 
 ature. 
 
 Most of the literature of any value produced in this 
 country up to the time of the war had come from the 
 North. The literature of the South, of course with 
 certain exceptions, had been feeble, imitative, exag 
 gerated, affected and sentimental. First, regarding 
 their books descriptive of their own society, I mean 
 their novels, these books did not describe society 
 truly. They could not do so. The reason of this 
 inability of Southern literature was that there was 
 one institution regarding which it dared not speak 
 the truth. That institution was one of vast impor 
 tance and one which touched society closely at every 
 point. Its necessary facts were abhorrent to the 
 sentiments of the civilized world. The Southern 
 people were themselves part and parcel of modern 
 civilization, and they could not bear a representation 
 of their system which should show how irreconcilable 
 it was with the civilization to which they belonged. 
 In other societies in which slavery has existed 
 writers have been free enough to describe it. There 
 is in Juvenal a description of a cruel woman, who
 
 Southern Literature 89 
 
 sends for the slave beater, and who is represented as 
 pursuing her ordinary household employments while 
 he beats the slaves. Says the poet: "While he beats, 
 she is employed in enameling her face. She listens to 
 her friends' chat, or she examines the broad gold of 
 an embroidered robe. Still he lashes. She pores over 
 the items in her long diary of household expenses. 
 Still he lashes," etc. A Roman poet could so speak. 
 But in those ancient days there was no great mass of 
 Christian sentiment such as in our own time es 
 poused the slave's cause and accused the conscience 
 of the master. They had no Exeter Hall in those 
 days and no Faneuil Hall, and no great and growing 
 Republican party. I doubt if you will find so candid 
 a passage as this from Juvenal in the whole range of 
 Southern literature. Such freedom of description 
 was out of the question. The Southern writers who 
 touched upon slavery could only describe the amiable 
 side of it. They had to represent the relation between 
 master and slave as a patriarchal one. There was no 
 doubt a great deal of truth in that view. A humane 
 master did stand in a patriarchal relation to his 
 slaves. But it was not the whole truth or indeed 
 more than half the truth. There was, no doubt, a 
 great deal of cruelty. Upon this the Southern writers 
 were, of course, silent. But they did not dare to 
 describe such unpleasant facts as were necessary to 
 and quite inseparable from the system. One morning 
 I was riding northward along the macadamized road 
 that traversed the Valley of Virginia when I met an 
 old negro woman picking blackberries by the side of 
 the road. I said: "Where are you going, auntie?" 
 She answered: "God knows, massa; I don't." I 
 looked ahead and saw that she belonged to a drove
 
 90 A Virginian Village 
 
 of negroes who were being taken south. There was a 
 pretty thick drove, perhaps one hundred of them, 
 so that I had to ride down into a little stream that 
 ran by the side of the road to let them pass. They 
 came on walking at a brisk pace. Following the 
 drove there was a rather smart carnage drawn by 
 two horses, a black man driving on the front seat, 
 which was separated by glass from the two seats 
 inside, on which were two well-dressed white men, 
 the owners or overseers of the lot, and with them two 
 mulatto women, no doubt also slaves, a mulatto 
 woman seated by each man. The men were laughing 
 and talking with the women, the women also laugh 
 ing, and the men seemed to be treating them with a 
 certain respect. 
 
 Such an incident as that of the old woman was a 
 necessary result of the system. Of course, the good 
 masters did not like to sell their slaves and would not 
 do it if they could help it. But they could not al 
 ways help it. Then there had to be some bad mas 
 ters. The South had to have its proportion of bad 
 people like the rest of the world. They could not 
 all be patriarchs. Slaves would thus be sold. If 
 there were slaves to be bought, there would, of 
 course, be vile fellows who would make a business 
 of dealing in them, and would buy them in large 
 numbers. (These men were known as "nigger 
 traders" and were held in great contempt by the 
 Southern people.) Like any other merchandise, the 
 slaves would be transferred from the cheapest to the 
 dearest market, and the least expensive way to do 
 this was to take them on foot. Thus you have the 
 incident of the roadside to which I have just re 
 ferred, and nobody in particular to blame. Yet you
 
 Southern Literature 91 
 
 would not see an incident of this sort in a novel 
 description of Southern life. 
 
 The obligation of the Southern writers to make a 
 representation which should accord with the theory 
 of patriarchal ownership was destructive of all vigor. 
 They were under some such enfeebling limitation as 
 Landseer would have suffered from had he been 
 compelled to represent in every picture a theory of 
 patriarchal government of dogs. Suppose Land- 
 seer had never been permitted to paint a dog that 
 was not happy. Suppose he had never been able to 
 paint a mournful or an unfortunate dog. What a 
 restraint it would have been upon the liberty of the 
 artist. The Southern writers were just as much im 
 peded by the necessity they were under never to 
 paint a negro who was not laughing. The other 
 arts, I dare say, suffered from the same limitation. 
 A painter, for instance, might only represent some 
 very happy darkies in a prodigiously rich cotton 
 field, bearing, say, 400 pounds to the acre, such a 
 picture as you now see hanging in the cotton ex 
 changes of the Southern States. I happen, indeed, 
 to know a case from which it would seem that it was 
 difficult for a painter at the South to represent a 
 negro at all. The late Mr. Healy, the American 
 portrait painter, living in Paris, told me that on one 
 occasion he was employed at Washington by Daniel 
 Webster to paint a portrait of an old negro woman, 
 who had been for many years a servant in Webster's 
 family and to whom he was greatly attached. Web 
 ster was much pleased with the picture, and the 
 artist himself thought that he had succeeded with 
 it. It was accordingly placed for exhibition in the 
 rotunda of the Capitol. But some of the members
 
 92 A Virginian Village 
 
 objected to this; they said that it was not proper 
 that the portrait of a negro woman should be hung 
 up in the rotunda of the Capitol. "But," said the 
 artist, "suppose it was a cat or a dog, you would 
 not mind, would you? Why, then, can't I paint a 
 negro?" But they would not hear of it, and it was 
 removed. 
 
 But the Southern writers, from being unable to be 
 veracious upon one subject, seemed to lose the power 
 of veracity regarding all subjects. They became 
 imitative, exaggerated and sentimental. Their so 
 ciety they Europeanized. The Southern planter 
 was an English squire. They made him a feeble 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, and his farm or plantation a 
 rather shabby English manor house. They imi 
 tated, among other characteristics of the classic 
 describers of English rural life, their mildness of 
 temper. But this good nature became, in the pages 
 of Southern writers, excessive. The calm catholicity 
 of Addison and the gentle optimism of the intelligent 
 and the ever delightful Irving degenerated in such 
 works as Kennedy's "Swallow Barn" into an amia 
 bility decidedly cloying. That book is a pretty 
 picture of departed happiness and sociality, a 
 charming record of the bright laughter, the friend 
 ship so sincere and cordial, the manners so simple 
 and well bred, of those long forgotten mornings of 
 1820. But it is kind almost to the point of absurdity. 
 The foibles of the comic hero are chaffed so affec 
 tionately; such a gentle ridicule is administered to 
 the fop; and the sentimentality and affectation of 
 the spinster are so very tenderly treated. Imitative 
 in everything, the Southern writers were imitative 
 even in their jokes, which were, as a rule, pretty bad.
 
 Southern Literature 93 
 
 Here is a joke from the pages of Mr. Gilmore Simms, 
 of South Carolina. A master calls to his slave: 
 "Here, Cuffee, you thrice blackened baby of 
 Beelzebub; come here, you imp of darkness." This 
 is the sort of joke for which a precedent might have 
 been cited out of Sir Walter Scott and would there 
 fore do very well. 
 
 Everything was exaggerated. All their geese be 
 came swans. This is a tendency greatly to be re 
 gretted, for it is a sad day for literature when it be 
 comes too good for the facts. The truth is that 
 geese are the more poetical of the two. But the 
 Southern writers did not think this. A soldier was 
 a cavalier; a house was a hall. They kept up this 
 high-flown phraseology during the period of the 
 war. You would have thought that the flag which 
 they carried with such bravery upon so many bloody 
 fields was poetical enough in itself, but they called 
 that an "oriflamme." They represented everything 
 as different from what it was. They did not seem to 
 be able to describe even natural objects correctly. 
 I should have expected this. If you and I, when we 
 met, had something in common on our minds of 
 which we dared not speak, we could hardly talk 
 truthfully about the weather. So the Southern 
 writers could not describe a bird, a flower or a star 
 as it was. One of their poets, I remember, addresses 
 the mocking-bird as "Yorick" and "Abbot of Mis 
 rule." But in truth they made very little account 
 of natural objects. It is curious to observe how 
 little they had to say about them. The natural 
 facts of the South were very peculiar and most unlike 
 those of other parts of the world, but they had never 
 been heard of in rural England or in Provence of the
 
 94 A Virginian Village 
 
 troubadours, and the Southern writers would not 
 recognize them. 
 
 One characteristic of Southern antebellum litera 
 ture, I should like to remark, is that it was rarely 
 vulgar, a claim which can scarcely be made for the 
 literature of the North during that period. It is 
 strange that this should be so, for there is, of course, 
 a relation between affectation and vulgarity. In 
 general, the surest way to be vulgar is to pretend to 
 be something you are not, and that is what the 
 Southern writers were always doing. And yet they 
 were not vulgar. I fancy the explanation of this is 
 that, underneath their apparent affectation, there 
 was a deep-seated simplicity. 
 
 The characteristics of antebellum literature are 
 very noticeable in a book I have been lately trying 
 to read, a book which I had not seen since I was a 
 boy, "Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi." 
 I remember it well as it stood on the shelf in my 
 father's library, in two volumes, with some gay letter 
 ing running down the back. I was very fond of it at 
 that time. I particularly remember the dedication, 
 "To the Old Folks at home in the Valley of the Shen- 
 andoah," which I thought pretty as coming from the 
 Augusta County lad who had gone to seek his for 
 tune among those wild fellows in the Southwest. 
 Lincoln, by the way, was an admirer of this book. 
 It was to Baldwin, the author, who was in Wash 
 ington during the war and who wanted to get through 
 the lines to his family in Staunton, that he said one 
 of his best things: that he "had very little influence 
 with this Administration." The book, however, is 
 very disappointing. It ought to have been a good 
 book. The author could hardly have had a better
 
 Southern Literature 95 
 
 subject. As I have heard that Southwestern so 
 ciety described in my youth by elderly men who had 
 known it, it must have been highly interesting. 
 They told me that it was composed of nothing but 
 young men, who were full of animal spirits and in 
 the pink of condition, and who, as there were negroes 
 for the hard manual labor, had little to do but to 
 amuse themselves, and that they did amuse them 
 selves with a vengeance. Now, if the author had 
 only contented himself with describing this society 
 as it was, what a good book he might have made, for 
 he is not at all wanting in humor and in powers of 
 perception and expression. But he is so dreadfully 
 literary. Where he will condescend to give the 
 facts he is interesting, but for the most part he is so 
 bent on being like Scott or Addison that one finds 
 him very tiresome. 
 
 There was one book of those days, however, which 
 was quite without the faults above indicated. This 
 was Longstreet's "Georgia Scenes," a book written 
 with a great deal of freedom and truthfulness. It 
 was about contemporaneous with "Swallow Barn." 
 Longstreet was a Georgia judge and lawyer, noted 
 particularly as an advocate in criminal cases. On 
 account of the death of a child, he grew interested 
 in religious subjects and became a Methodist min 
 ister. He was a member of the Methodist General 
 Conference of 1844, at which the Southern Metho 
 dists separated from their Northern brethren, Long- 
 street taking an active part in bringing about the 
 separation. He lived until after the war and was 
 late in life the president of a Southern university. 
 He seems to have been in character not very unlike 
 other Southern politicians. I don't know why he
 
 96 A Virginian Village 
 
 should have written a book which differed from those 
 of other Southern writers. But I am very sure that 
 he did. His book has a truthfulness which makes 
 you think of the early ages of literature, of a day be 
 fore periodicals, and books, and printers, and edi 
 tors, when men of genius, from no other motives 
 than the desire of fame and the strong need of ex 
 pression, engraved their intense thoughts upon tab 
 lets of clay. 
 
 While speaking of exceptions, I might mention 
 one very important exception to the remark made at 
 the beginning of this paper, concerning the general 
 inferiority of Southern antebellum literature. Poe 
 had received a Southern education and was very 
 Southern. Like other Southern writers he was Euro 
 pean and imitative. He wrote of nothing that he 
 saw except with his mind's eye. Surely nothing 
 that could suggest his "radiant palace" existed near 
 Baltimore or Richmond, the Southern towns in 
 which he had lived. His Guy de Veres and Ula- 
 lumes and Annabel Lees were of foreign origin, so 
 far as they had any origin save in his own head. 
 But, whether European and imitative or not, Poe 
 succeeds by the right of genius, and fame, which 
 cares little for the whys and the wherefores, so long 
 as the genius is real and effective, will always follow 
 him. Critics dilate upon the contrast between a per 
 sonality apparently so uninteresting, or at any rate 
 so devoid of salient characteristics, and his success as 
 a poetical performer. A hundred years hence, no 
 doubt, they will still be dilating upon this contrast 
 and reading his poems. 
 
 I did think that the impediment to good literature 
 above mentioned, namely, the want of truth re-
 
 Southern Literature 97 
 
 suiting from fear, would disappear with slavery. I 
 have been compelled to modify that expectation. For 
 one thing, characteristics do not disappear with the 
 disappearance of the causes which produced them. 
 But the causes still remain in the continued existence 
 of the African race. Opinions regarding that race 
 which differ from those of the mass are not tolerated 
 in the South. Or if they can be said to be tolerated, it 
 is only toleration which is allowed them. But litera 
 ture cannot exist upon toleration. It must have 
 liberty. Without liberty there cannot be that alert 
 and nimble way of looking about and that fidelity in 
 recording what is seen which are necessary to litera 
 ture. If the writer feels that what he says will be 
 received with disapprobation, he will be silent. 
 
 But it is not only regarding the negroes that liberty 
 of speech is discouraged in the South. You see the 
 same want of freedom in the discussion of other sub 
 jects. A few years ago in a town in Tennessee I 
 was calling at a pleasant house on a Sunday after 
 noon. I had been to church in the morning. In a 
 pew in front of me sat a row of very handsome girls. 
 Their father, an old friend of mine, one of the nicest 
 fellows in the world, had some years before been shot 
 in a quarrel with a political adversary whom he had 
 mortally wounded with a knife and who died the 
 next day. I ventured to remark what a pity it was 
 that these fine girls had been deprived of such a 
 father, how he would have enjoyed them and what a 
 friend they would have found in him, a safe enough 
 observation, it would seem. But it was evident 
 that it was not well received. One young lady who 
 was present said that she had been informed that 
 the feud between these two men had become so bitter
 
 98 A Virginian Village 
 
 that the best way out of it was that one or both of 
 them should die, a proposition surely not difficult 
 of refutation. Did the young lady express her own 
 real opinions? I do not think so. She rather 
 wished to be saying what she thought the others 
 present would wish to hear. 
 
 It seems odd that the South can be said to be de 
 ficient in that encouraging sympathy which is essen 
 tial to the production of good literature, for if there 
 is a quality with which the Southern people are 
 specially gifted, it is sympathy. They have this 
 quality to a greater degree than any people I have 
 ever met with. The quality, indeed, is a charac 
 teristic of Americans in general, in part possibly due 
 to democracy, in part possibly also an inheritance 
 from our colonial life, colonial societies being, one 
 would expect, receptive and sympathetic. But 
 among no other Americans does the quality exist so 
 strongly as among the Southern people, and it is the 
 especial characteristic of their gentlemen. I have 
 in mind as I write an individual, lately dead, a man 
 who, with a great deal of learning and scholarship^ 
 and a fine literary discernment and discrimination, 
 had an unselfish sympathy and generosity of mind, 
 such as you are not likely to find in quite the same 
 degree among men other than Americans of Southern 
 birth. There is no reason why I should not mention 
 his name; I mean the late Prof. Thomas Price. 
 This quality of an individual I believe to be that of 
 the Southern people in general. It ought, one 
 would think, to be an encouraging cause of literary 
 performance. 
 
 I cannot claim to be as well read as I should be iia 
 the literature of the South which has appeared since
 
 Southern Literature 99 
 
 the war. But from poems and sketches which I 
 have read from time to time, it is evident that the 
 general want of literary truth, which has been attrib 
 uted to Southern antebellum literature, does not 
 characterize the more recent literature of the South. 
 It seems to me that some of these things are good 
 enough to form part of the permanent literature of 
 the country and language. Among them I might 
 mention some very delicate poems by the late Father 
 Tabb, which I have seen in the magazines, and some 
 sketches by Mr. Thomas Nelson Page. These are, 
 However, either poems mostly descriptive of natural 
 scenery or sketches representing limited phases of 
 Southern life. But have the Southern writers been 
 equally successful in depicting Southern life as a 
 whole? It has seemed to me significant that some 
 of these writers prefer historical subjects. In their 
 books the young ladies who, I am told, are usually 
 the authors of them, are very free with "Odd zooks" 
 and "Marry come up," and other such safe and re 
 mote forms of expression, but the books, of course, 
 have little that bears upon the present Southern life. 
 Is it that these young writers are afraid to tackle 
 this subject?
 
 A HORSE-FAIR PILGRIMAGE 
 
 THERE is one peculiarity of natural scenery 
 that I always associate with the agricultural 
 fairs, which I am in the habit of attending in 
 various parts of the country the reason being that 
 these fairs occur in the late summer and early au 
 tumn, when this peculiarity exists. I mean the 
 mist which you see in the distance. A transparent 
 veil of autumn haze dims the surrounding country, 
 which seems to revive under it with the verdure of a 
 deceptive spring-time, and lies upon the distant 
 meadows with a touch infinitely soft. The mist is 
 always there. The horses contend around the track, 
 and the big, handsome bulls doze and chew the cud 
 before the grand stand, while the judges walk round 
 them; the parachute man goes up, and the trained 
 elks plunge thirty feet into water, and the man and 
 woman in tights and spangles perform on the trapeze. 
 But still that mist dreams on, its blue, inward, 
 musing eye resting upon some thought, remote from 
 earth and human things. 
 
 Wherever I attend these fairs, whether in New 
 England, Virginia, Kentucky, or the Western States, 
 the mist surrounds me. One has a consciousness or 
 half consciousness of it, as one watches from the 
 grand stand the jogging of the horses round the 
 track. It obscured the limits of the burnt-up coun 
 try, suffering from a prolonged drought, during a 
 visit to a State fair held not long ago at the capital 
 of one of our Western States. The Western fair-
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 101 
 
 grounds are, as a rule, more imposing than those of 
 the East. The full-mile track looks generous and 
 prosperous when compared to the half-mile tracks 
 common in New England, although these again have 
 an attraction of a different sort in their casual and 
 informal character. The Western fair-grounds are 
 kept in perfect condition, and have a smooth and 
 clean appearance; the track itself, the fences, and 
 outlying stables all suggesting an agreeable thrift 
 and prosperity. They look best in a flat country, as, 
 for instance, at Terre Haute, or Springfield, 111., or 
 in an undulating country like blue-grass Kentucky. 
 The track at Terre Haute is particularly clean and 
 smart; that at Lexington has a little more of the 
 Southern negligence, but suggests, nevertheless, the 
 easy-going prosperity of that country. None of the 
 fair-grounds I have seen, however, are smarter and 
 more thorough than those at Springfield. There are 
 similar grounds in Iowa, Minnesota, and other 
 Western States. 
 
 During a week spent at one of these fairs, I was in 
 the habit of going to the fair-grounds in the morning 
 before the show had begun. If you go early enough, 
 you will have the stand almost to yourself, and you 
 may sit in the shade and see the horses worJked. 
 There will be, perhaps, a dozen of them being jogged. 
 You will see their legs wink around the track, and 
 hear the beat of their hoofs, thump, thump, thump 
 (how can legs and feet stand it!), as their feet strike 
 the hard, smooth roadbed. You think you could 
 close your eyes and tell the pacers from the trotters 
 by the sound of their hoofs, in which you would 
 probably be mistaken. It is not altogether easy at 
 times to tell pacers from trotters with your eyes
 
 IO2 A Virginian Village 
 
 open. This may be so even when the horse is right 
 in front of you; at the distance of a half mile it is 
 quite impossible to tell the difference. Indeed the 
 difference is less marked than used to be supposed. 
 The pacers and trotters are all from trotting stock, 
 the pacing habit, however, being stronger in certain 
 families than in others. The trait is constantly 
 coming out in unexpected ways. In Iowa I saw a 
 pacing-colt out of a trotting-mare, and by a trotting- 
 horse, and he was the fifth pacing-colt that this mare 
 had dropped, all by trotting-horses. I saw him a few 
 hours after he was foaled. I clapped my hands and 
 ran after him, and, in what were probably the first 
 steps of his earthly pilgrimage taken out of a walk, 
 he broke into a pace. The trotting instinct is just as 
 decided and original. If you run after a trotting- 
 colt, he may break into a canter to get away from 
 you, but, if you still pursue him, he will, to increase 
 his speed, go from a canter into a trot. How close 
 is the relation between the two gaits is shown by the 
 fact that most trotters pace and most pacers trot. 
 You will notice on the track that pacers, when they 
 go slow, trot, and trotters, when they go slow, pace. 
 The whole question between trotters and pacers 
 is very interesting. I suppose there is no doubt which 
 is the handsomer gait. But pacing has its advan 
 tages. It is easier for the animal. It is sometimes 
 said that pacing is the device of short-bodied horses 
 to prevent interfering. A pacer advances both legs 
 on the same side at once, so that his fore leg is out of 
 the way when he advances his hind leg. A trotter 
 does just the reverse. He advances at the same time 
 the fore and hind legs on different sides, so that his 
 fore leg may be in the way when he advances his
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 103 
 
 hind leg. But I do not see that pacers are shorter 
 bodied than trotters. A short-bodied horse, when 
 trotting, is likely to avoid interfering by resorting to 
 the ugly device of going wide behind. My belief is 
 that pacing is the expedient of the animal to lessen 
 the shock of the resistance of the hard ground as he 
 increases his speed. As a matter of fact pacing is not 
 so hard on horses as trotting. I said to a blacksmith 
 in a Western town, a devout man whose prayers and 
 exhortations I had heard at the village prayer- 
 meeting and in whose hospitable smithy cooled by 
 some umbrageous maples, I loved to pass the morning 
 hours; a very nice fellow, from whom I thought I got 
 the real truth a little straighter than from anyone 
 else in the neighborhood: "Now this is a great coun 
 try for harness-horses, and you shoe most of the 
 horses about here and ought to know their feet better 
 than anyone else, which do you say last the longest, 
 the feet of the trotters or the pacers?" He said, 
 "Undoubtedly, the pacers." 
 
 The pacing habit is common among animals. 
 Many animals pace or at any rate hit the ground side- 
 wise cattle, for instance; and, among dogs, setters. 
 I think you will observe that a woman, when running 
 for a street-car, usually paces, although this is prob 
 ably due to a sense that it is the more feminine and 
 modest method of progression. I believe pacing to 
 be a rather more natural gait than trotting. Trot 
 ting, as it exists in our fast horses, is scarcely a nat 
 ural gait, but is rather the result of breeding and 
 education. Trotting is fast walking, and it is not 
 natural that a horse should walk at the rate of a mile 
 in two minutes and some seconds. The natural 
 change, when increasing speed, is to a run, the next
 
 IO4 A Virginian Village 
 
 most natural to a pace. The fact that, among all 
 horses except trotters, the record is held by stallions, 
 whereas among trotters, until recently, it has been 
 always held by mares or geldings, is an indication 
 that the gait is artificial. (I mean speedy trotting, 
 of course.) 
 
 I heard a story of what you would call a natural 
 pacer from a young man sitting by me in the stand 
 one morning. This horse, when he broke, would go 
 from a pace into a gallop, but, when he ran away, 
 he would go from a gallop into a pace, and would 
 pace over everything, over the tops of fences, taking 
 the sulky with him. It is pleasant to hear a yarn 
 like this on a bright morning from a chance com 
 panion, a sociable and apparently truthful fellow 
 the horses meantime jogging back and forth in front 
 of you. There is a good deal of such exchange of 
 criticism and anecdote among the experts sitting 
 together, stop-watches in hand, to whom the history 
 of the horses is known. 
 
 Let me say here that trotting, whether natural or 
 not, is certainly beautiful, and that the trotting-turf 
 is worthy of preservation and encouragement, as the 
 fly-wheel in which is stored up, to be dealt out as 
 needed, the fine trotting action of our steppers. 
 
 Later in the morning the judging begins; and then 
 is done much of the less popular, but still, very im 
 portant and scientific judging, such as the judging of 
 sheep, cattle, and other animals for breeding pur 
 poses. There are in a class three or four big bulls, 
 very stately and handsome, and looking extremely 
 bored. "Do you know anything about cattle?" 
 I said to one of the most noted horsemen in the coun 
 try, who was standing by. He said: "Nothing what-
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 105 
 
 ever," and no doubt he thought so. But presently 
 I heard him say, contemptuously and with some 
 feeling: "That bull has a very common face." The 
 incident illustrated the closeness of stockmen to 
 animal life, which is so novel and pleasing to men 
 from town. 
 
 The judging of trotting-horses and the trotting 
 and pacing races are reserved for the afternoon, 
 when the crowd comes. Ordinarily not much is made 
 of saddle-horses at Western fairs. But about a dozen 
 Kentucky and Missouri horses had been brought 
 here, and at the saddle-horse competition in the 
 afternoon three or four good ones appeared and a 
 half-dozen tolerable ones. The three or four good 
 ones were much of a kind, and one was put to one's 
 trumps to make up one's mind among them. The 
 little bay was the best, and next to him the chestnut; 
 and yet you were a little perplexed, not quite sure, 
 and you probed the depths of your consciousness 
 in search of the nicest and most exact justice. 
 
 But what is this approaching, quite ten minutes 
 late? a black stallion, head up and ambling forward 
 in a leisurely manner and with reprehensible swagger 
 and an expression of laying out the whole field. It 
 is the famous Rex McDonald. No need now to probe 
 the depths of your consciousness, for by the vote of 
 every man, woman, and child in the multitude look 
 ing on, the blue ribbon must go to him. 
 
 Later in the afternoon the crowds increase, the 
 grand stand becomes a dense mass of people, and 
 there are crowds of people everywhere about the 
 grounds. To save time the various races are run to 
 gether. After the first heat of a trotting-race has 
 been run, and while the trotters, having been rubbed
 
 io6 A Virginian Village 
 
 down and blanketed, are being led to cool off, the 
 first heat of a pacing-race is run. An odd five minutes 
 between races is utilized to give a bay trotting- 
 stallion a chance to make a record. If he can do the 
 mile in 2.30, it is a great thing for Flanagan II., the 
 horse in question much too handsome a creature, 
 by the way, to wear such a name. Few people pay 
 attention to this; the crowd regards it as a kind of 
 recess; but it is very amusing to me. Can he do it? 
 He makes his way around the mile, doing pretty 
 well, you think. If you have no stop-watch, or are 
 not skilful in the use of one, you must wait for the 
 result from the judges' stand. He has missed it. 
 From the stand are displayed the figures 2.31^. 
 But he will have a chance later on. After another 
 pacing heat, the bay again appears. This time he 
 has it. The judges hang out 2.29^. 
 
 I could get a better view of the more important 
 judging and racing by going down to the judges' 
 stand, to the neighborhood of which my press badge 
 admitted me. I sat down on the steps leading up to 
 the stand, by two little bare-footed boys, without 
 jackets, and with one suspender each, who had got 
 there in some way known to themselves, and were 
 trusting to their insignificance to be allowed to 
 remain, and to that gift of invisibility which the 
 small boy, himself all eyes and ears, shares with the 
 divinities of Homeric story when they mix themselves 
 up in human actions. But presently one of the 
 starters spied them. I don't mean the chief man who 
 does the starting, the big, handsome, ruddy-visaged 
 old man, with the stentor voice, who, with his hand 
 on the bell, shouts to the crowd of rushing chariot 
 eers, each trying to get some unfair advantage:
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 107 
 
 "Keep back that pole horse; if you gentlemen don't 
 stop that, I'll fine you twenty-five dollars." (This 
 is not at all an empty threat; he will do it, and much 
 more, if he is sufficiently provoked.) It was not he, 
 but one of his assistants who caught sight of the boys, 
 and drove them off with the words: "The next thing 
 you boys'll be wanting to keep time." The cruel 
 sarcasm sped after the little retreating figures. You 
 could see the blighting effects of the taunt in their 
 ragged backs and dirty little heels, as they moved 
 away. They to keep time! 
 
 There were sixty thousand people there the after 
 noon Star Pointer and Joe Patchen paced. The 
 entrance-fee was fifty cents, so that the fair could well 
 afford to pay the owners of these horses four thousand 
 dollars for a single race. They got this besides the 
 stake. I saw the horses worked around the track in 
 the morning. I think I never got from any horse 
 such an impression of leonine power as from Joe 
 Patchen, when he was ambling before the sulky at 
 five miles an hour. I saw the first two heats from 
 the stand, and, after the second heat, crossed over 
 into the enclosure which the track surrounds, where 
 they were rubbing down the horses. To see a trotter 
 rubbed down after a race is of the nature of a moral 
 Turkish bath to the observer. The combination of 
 sun heat and animal heat is very strong; the heat 
 of the animal sensibly raises the temperature in the 
 immediate neighborhood of the horse. Under the 
 fine dripping coat, from which the groom tosses off 
 the perspiration with a scraper, the network of veins 
 distends. Those upon the small, bony head are 
 fullest, the refined face wet and black with sweat, and 
 the large, melancholy eye rolling with the luxury of
 
 io8 A Virginian Village 
 
 the rubbing. A certain pride is noticeable in the 
 group standing about, a sense that this is a significant 
 and important occasion. "That is Star Pointer," is 
 the thought of each of the little crowd of touts, small 
 boys, darkies, and tramps looking on. 
 
 Leaving Star Pointer in the hands of the rubbers, I 
 crossed to the side of the track opposite the stand, 
 where John Hughes's saddle-horses were stabled. 
 Hughes brought out Rex McDonald for me to see 
 Hughes himself, a fine example of what blue-grass 
 Kentucky can do in the way of raising men. He 
 stood there, tall, deep-chested, and broad-shouldered, 
 his chest the broader for the great expanse of shirt- 
 front, in the middle of which was a gigantic diamond 
 pin that made one think of the big Kentucky prices. 
 Rex McDonald is a singularly beautiful horse. He is 
 thick in the shoulder, being in this respect like his 
 father, Black Squirrel, which great horse the Garrett 
 boys showed me in Kentucky when I was there just 
 before his death. I suppose they called him Black 
 Squirrel because of the high tail he carried. Rex 
 McDonald has the light Kentucky cannon-bone, of 
 which one can only say that one could wish it were 
 heavier, and yet that it does not seem to matter very 
 much. I was sorry, however, that I could not con 
 vince myself that he was able to trot squarely. Nor 
 could one of the eleven gaited horses trot quite true 
 and square. 
 
 I should add, however, that I was somewhat un 
 fortunate in this experience. I have seen Kentucky 
 horses and, for that matter, gaited horses from va 
 rious parts of the country, that were good single- 
 footers, and could also trot square. Lou Chief is 
 such an animal. She will rack up the street, and turn
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 109 
 
 round, and trot back perfectly square. The ability 
 to do this I have always found rare, and have ac 
 cepted it as an indication of great natural cleverness 
 in the horse. But I have, of late, seen reason to 
 modify my notions upon this subject. My view 
 used to be that, while there could be no objection to 
 teaching a horse to singlefoot if it did not spoil his 
 trot, as a matter of fact it did almost always spoil his 
 trot, and that it was, therefore, best not to teach it. 
 But I have, of late, been surprised to see many horses 
 that could both singlefoot and trot. Now, if we can 
 have singlefoot without spoiling the trot, it is cer 
 tainly desirable to have it. The habit of riding con 
 tinually at a trot is hard upon horses' feet, legs, and 
 shoulders. It is better to vary the trot with a canter, 
 and still further with singlefooting. Whether single- 
 footing is easier upon horses than trotting, as pacing 
 is, I am not sure, but I am inclined to think it is. 
 In a singlefoot there is the same lateral contact with 
 the ground as in a pace. It is hard to tell, by watch 
 ing him, what a singlefooter does with his feet; if 
 you attempt it, you will probably end by looking in 
 the dictionary. [How the dictionary man found it 
 out is none of your business.] It is, of course, a highly 
 artificial gait. As for the comfort of it, I have known 
 some singlefooters in whom the gait was a lullaby. 
 As we stood there a colored man from Missouri 
 rode by on a stallion that had been shown that 
 afternoon. I said: "That Missouri horse ought to 
 have got something." Hughes answered, with that 
 rough and friendly tone of Kentucky banter: "Why, 
 man, where are your eyes; look at his hocks! " They 
 were a little rough. We were standing by Rex Mc 
 Donald, discussing him and his history, when Star
 
 no A Virginian Village 
 
 Pointer and Joe Patchen were seen approaching 
 in the third and final heat. They thundered past us 
 about twenty feet away. The young reporters spoke 
 of Star Pointer as moving like a lion, in which they 
 were wide of the mark. A pacer may rarely be said 
 to go like a lion, pacing being a less animated gait 
 than trotting. I noticed, as he went by, that Star 
 Pointer's action was particularly placid. He moved 
 with the equanimity of a fish paddling with its fins in 
 clear, still water. But he did that heat in two min 
 utes. 
 
 The very hot weather that prevailed at the fair 
 may have helped these horses to make this low record. 
 The fair was held early in October, but the weather 
 was as hot as August, quite 90 degrees in the shade. 
 There had been a drought that had lasted for weeks, 
 months even. As you drove about the country, you 
 could hardly see the land for the dust. The corn 
 fields were burnt up, and even the woods parched in 
 their inmost recesses. Everywhere there was the 
 utmost vegetable disarray and confusion. Ceres 
 stood in tatters in the cornfields. The red and yellow 
 apples shone like flames amid the sun-dried foliage of 
 the orchards and lay thick upon the ground. The 
 pumpkins were heaped up or rolled about the fields, 
 and the almost naked corn-stalks, upon which a few 
 dry blades rattled in the dust-laden wind, held up 
 their burden of ripe ears. And yet, hot and arid as it 
 was, you had a sense of great agricultural wealth. 
 The heat, of which the oldest inhabitant did not 
 remember the like, seemed unnatural and unprec 
 edented. My notion was that the chariot of the 
 Sun-god had veered from his course, and passed 
 nearer our planet, burning up the fields and wood-
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 1 1 1 
 
 lands and, from his heaped-up cornucopia, scattering 
 the earth with litter and largess of autumn fruitful- 
 ness. For some reason the old classical fables were 
 always in my head. I fancied that the divinities of 
 the ancient world, which were after all borrowed by 
 the Romans from the Greeks, had found in this 
 stretch of flat prairie a most appropriate theatre for 
 their activities. In particular the old myth of Proser 
 pine and the struggle between the powers of the 
 upper and the lower worlds became very real to me. 
 I never saw the struggle so fierce before. Ordinary 
 autumn warm weather is even more suggestive of the 
 end of the summer than cold winds and rain are. 
 You walk out under the trees of a warm autumn 
 afternoon, the atmosphere a golden fluid, perfectly 
 still. The maple leaves, of a pale and dying verdure, 
 scarcely stir. There is no air to move even the spider- 
 woven film that depends from the branches. The 
 whole scene, of a sicklied yellow, reminds one of some 
 fruit, fair and ripe at the rind, but with disease and 
 death at the core. The hot weather of those October 
 days was not at all of this feeble and apologetic 
 character. I thought rather that the powers of life 
 had sent a fiery challenge to Pluto, deep under his 
 crust of twelve-foot thick black prairie; that there 
 would be no more winter; that this time the daughter 
 of Ceres would not be given back for Proserpine, 
 long due in the underworld, still wandered among the 
 corn-shucks and pumpkin-vines of Sangamon and 
 Cass Counties. 
 
 I thought I could see the results of the agricultural 
 wealth of the country in the looks of the people. 
 The rich soil had brought prosperity and with it 
 good food and lodging, which are causes of beauty
 
 112 A Virginian Village 
 
 in human beings as in other animals. The average 
 of good looks, both among men and women, impressed 
 me as very high, and I saw many beautiful children. 
 I had one opportunity of making a somewhat closer 
 acquaintance with the people than would usually 
 fall to the lot of a stranger. It was my habit to 
 spend the whole day at the fair-grounds, coming 
 early and staying till night. It was, therefore, neces 
 sary for me to dine there, and the moving about 
 among the live stock made one hungry by noon. 
 Most of the stands offered food of an untidy appear 
 ance. But I saw, nailed up on a tree, a notice that 
 the ladies of the First Methodist Church would, 
 for fifty cents, give a dinner at the south end of the 
 Steam Plough exhibit. Now, I was brought up in 
 that denomination and I am not without my de 
 nominational preferences and sympathies, and I had 
 an instinct that the proposition of the ladies of the 
 First Methodist Church was one to close with. I 
 walked through an interminable collection of agri 
 cultural machinery, at the end of which I found the 
 pavilion in which the dinner was given. At the door 
 there sat the figure of a large and statuesque young 
 woman with a handsome and benignant counte 
 nance, her lap full of silver dollars and half dollars. 
 What, I thought, some more mythology! Is this 
 Fortune? Are you Plenty? She looked precisely 
 as if taken from a book of classical woodcuts. The 
 countenance was handsome enough and the figure 
 noble enough for one of the lady deities of Olympus, 
 but she wore upon her lips an expression of benignity, 
 to find the like of which you must go to the canvases 
 of Christian art. I take it that those Olympian 
 ladies were very well as long as you pleased them,
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 113 
 
 but they had a rough side and could, upon occasion, 
 be most unkind; witness the treatment of Paris by 
 Juno and of Adonis by Venus egotistical actions, 
 unrestrained by a sentiment of pity or considerations 
 of abstract justice, which would now receive the 
 severe condemnation, not only of the graduates of 
 Girton and Wellesley and other representatives of 
 the higher education, but of every tea-table through 
 out the Christian world. For, say what you will, 
 since our era, woman, from her background of hope, 
 innocence, and an instructed ethical sense (these 
 qualities gathering force and refinement through 
 the ages), has looked upon mankind with an exquisite 
 natural kindness, a radiant innate joy and keen, 
 fine light of the intelligence and the affections not 
 to be found in quite the same kind and degree among 
 the women of the heathen world, so vaunted by 
 artists and poets. So much I thought I discerned in 
 the countenance of the young woman who was the 
 doorkeeper of the truly benevolent institution with 
 which I now made acquaintance. But to what 
 flight of the fancy is a hungry man not equal who 
 sees around him indications that he is about to have 
 a good dinner? The table-cloth was spotless and the 
 plates and glasses clean. The food, I found upon 
 nearer acquaintance, very clean and Christian, and 
 with a flavor of domesticity. The chicken and vege 
 tables were good, and the ice-cream grateful in the 
 terrific weather. We were waited upon by some 
 half-dozen young ladies who, as they handed you 
 these excellent dishes, beamed upon you and kept 
 on beaming, their voices in the meantime very 
 charming with their invitations and excuses. 
 
 It is unusual to find so many saddle-horses at a
 
 114 A Virginian Village 
 
 Western fair as there were here. You find them at 
 the fairs in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. 
 In Indiana, Illinois, or Iowa you would ordinarily 
 see but few of them. These would be from the trot 
 ting stock of the country. In Kentucky they get 
 many saddle-horses from this stock, and there is no 
 reason why this should not be done in other parts. 
 Among trotters anywhere you will see from time to 
 time an animal with the neck and shoulders of a 
 saddle-horse, and the right kind of hock action. You 
 can make a good saddle-horse out of such an animal, 
 although I am told by breeders and trainers that it 
 takes somewhat longer to do this than with the regu 
 lar saddle-bred Denmark horse or with thorough 
 breds. Of course, thoroughbreds anywhere can be 
 made into saddle-horses. There are a certain num 
 ber of thoroughbred stallions scattered throughout 
 the Western country, and from one of their colts 
 you may now and then get a good saddle-horse. I 
 saw in Iowa a singularly interesting example of this 
 kind of horse. He was that rare combination a 
 thoroughbred head and neck set upon a body of 
 extra substance. Old English prints constantly 
 represent this horse; they show him as a hunter and 
 as a harness-horse. The walls of stables are covered 
 with representations of him. Of course, you may 
 have as many pictures of him as you like, but of the 
 animal himself you will not see one in ten thousand. 
 The horse at this fair was as good a specimen of the 
 type as I have seen in this country or in England, 
 and good enough to be in a picture. He had the long, 
 tapering neck of a thoroughbred, with that little 
 bend near the head, and was beautifully cut out in 
 the throat. He was very handsomely marked be-
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 115 
 
 sides a red chestnut, with four white stockings up 
 to his knees. The prejudice against white feet, by 
 the way, is now a thing of the past. It is well it is 
 so, as there are so many white feet. Lincoln said, "I 
 believe that God must have liked plain people or He 
 would not have made so many of them." One can 
 not help thinking that God must like white feet on 
 horses, or He would not have made so many of them. 
 Some clever person should, before this, have ex 
 plained the reason of the prevalence of this marking; 
 just as the reason of the white tips on dogs' tails has 
 been explained to be that the dogs, when in a wild 
 state and members of a pack, might signal to one 
 another over the top of the tall grass. Mr. Wilfrid 
 Blunt tells me that the Arabs admired white mark 
 ings, and bred for them, which is a perfect explana 
 tion. Modern taste has accepted the marking as 
 good for purposes of decoration, certainly in the case 
 of chestnut horses. There is an agreement between 
 white and chestnut, either red or dark (liver-colored). 
 Anyone must have been pleased by the association 
 of white with liver-color or chocolate on the back of a 
 pointer dog. The combination of these colors on 
 horses is just as good, and the combination of white 
 with red chestnut, or even sorrel, is still more 
 brilliant. 
 
 As a rule, however, harness-horses rather than 
 saddle-horses are to be found at these fairs. The 
 horses most in evidence are, of course, the speed 
 horses entered in the trotting and pacing races. 
 Besides them there are the horses for breeding pur 
 poses, the trotting, hackney, and French coach 
 stallions and the brood mares, with their colts. 
 But there are also a limited number of horses ready
 
 n6 A Virginian Village 
 
 for market, coach and carnage horses, horses for 
 dogcarts, etc. There are not many such, as the 
 purpose of these fairs is different from that of a 
 horse-show; but the few there are you see under 
 natural and attractive conditions. 
 
 I saw the black mare, South Africa, at one of 
 these fairs, her great attraction being the buoyant 
 strength and momentum with which she moved. 
 She took many prizes throughout the West last 
 summer. The first time I saw her was one after 
 noon on the track at the fair-grounds at Toronto, 
 which are beautifully situated on the shore of Lake 
 Ontario. It was about four o'clock, and the sun 
 was shining. I was looking over the track, out 
 toward the water, which was blue, but not with the 
 bold, salt blue of the ocean. In the place of this, 
 the lake had a color the like of which I might have 
 expected to see on a vase or jar, but not on water. 
 The blue of the ocean was dulled or clouded to a 
 delicious hue, of a kind to baffle the imagination and 
 elude the memory of the poet and to vex, with its 
 exquisite precision, the emulous soul of the painter. 
 A big schooner was moving upon the water, the sun 
 glistening upon the bellying sails, as if upon cumulus 
 cloud, the swelling canvas, of a fairy grace and light 
 ness, flung to the midsummer zephyrs the whole 
 white mass of piled-up sail sliding along this plain of 
 blue china. The black mare was moving between 
 me and this scene. But better still I saw her the 
 next morning, when the lake was flashing under the 
 sun and had the freshness and freedom of that part 
 of the day. She was descending a slight declivity 
 the tan-bark rings of indoor horse-shows have no 
 declivities with an abundant and steady force and
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 117 
 
 that ease which is the condition of all beauty in 
 action. 
 
 This mare was hackney bred, by the way, and she 
 had unusual speed for an animal of that breeding. 
 There has been of late years a good deal of talk 
 against hackneys. But there is a place for these 
 horses. It is said that they have not the force and 
 courage of trotters. That may be, but for that rea 
 son they may suit people who wish especially to 
 have safe and quiet horses. An Englishman, who 
 has been a great exhibitor of show horses in this 
 country, and who began with a natural preference 
 for hackneys, told me that he now preferred trotters. 
 As showing the superiority in courage of trotters, he 
 said that, when his trotters were lying down in the 
 stall, he could get them up with a word, but that he 
 had to take a whip to get the hackneys up. I don't 
 see that that objection would be serious to people 
 anxious to have safe horses, which are at the same 
 time strong, handsome, and have good action, qual 
 ities which hackneys certainly have. A breeder of 
 hackneys to whom I mentioned this incident said: 
 "What nonsense that is!" And he added: "Of 
 course hackneys have not great speed, but they can 
 go as fast as carriage-horses ought to go." He made 
 this further claim for hackneys, that he could win 
 in the show-ring with a mare or gelding of hackney 
 breeding, while nearly all the trotting-bred prize 
 winners are stags that is, animals kept as stallions 
 long enough to get the crest of a stallion. I believe 
 it is true that most trotting-bred prize-winners are 
 stags, and that hackney mares sometimes win, as 
 was the case with this black mare at Toronto, which 
 also took first prize at the Syracuse State Fair.
 
 u8 A Virginian Village 
 
 This mare was brought to the last New York 
 horse-show, and got nothing but the gate. She was 
 not fine enough in the head and neck, and was too 
 short in the neck, I suppose. I dare say the judges 
 were quite right. They must act upon certain ac 
 cepted principles. And yet these rule-of-thumb 
 verdicts are not always consistent with the most 
 ideal and delicate justice. 
 
 A horse-show verdict is obtained in this way, and 
 it is, perhaps, the only way possible: You reduce 
 conformation, manners, and action to their simplest 
 terms, add, subtract, divide, and so on, and thus 
 get a result. But can a very beautiful quality be 
 always truly judged in this way? Is there a least 
 common denominator for the ultimate graces of 
 motion or of outline? The attraction of the animal 
 of which I have been speaking was her rhythmical 
 and buoyant way of moving. You cannot subtract 
 apples from oranges; nor can you subtract action, 
 such action as hers at any rate, from conformation. 
 I own, however, that she did not move in the Garden 
 as she did when I saw her at Toronto. There was 
 not room for her to get the swing and freedom of 
 her step. 
 
 In speaking of the prairie country I have, perhaps, 
 given the idea of a vast level manufactory of food 
 for men and horses. But prairie scenery is not 
 always of this character. One afternoon I passed, 
 in the train, over the country between Chicago and 
 the Mississippi. That is what is called a rolling 
 country, and hills usually limit a country. But it 
 is not so in that region, for the landscape is always 
 broad and spacious. It is what I should call a 
 swelling country. From the point at which you are,
 
 A Horse-Fair Pilgrimage 119 
 
 it appears to rise in all directions to its limits, which 
 are very remote. All the way across the country 
 the scenery is of the same stately kind. The sus 
 tained and equal character of it is itself a source of 
 pleasure. For six hours the panorama was unrolled 
 and moved past me with an unceasing pomp and 
 grandeur, most comfortable to the passive eye and 
 mind the distant hills, crowned with clumps of 
 neat woodland, having a slowness of motion that was 
 noble and imposing. During the whole afternoon 
 I was in a pleasant trance, nor was the charm broken 
 throughout the journey. On either side of the 
 railroad there were vast cornfields. The corn that 
 year had been unusually fine, and the time was mid- 
 August, when this crop is most luxuriant. The eye 
 was never tired of the profusion of dark green blades, 
 nor of the graceful sweep of the curves, in which the 
 corn dips and rises as it follows the lay of the ground. 
 I long tried to find the color of the tasselled sheen 
 upon the surface of the corn. It was just after sun 
 set when we crossed the Mississippi. The sun had 
 dropped behind some dark green hills to the west of 
 the river, and had left upon their crests a beacon of 
 clean, red flame, enriching the dark verdure of the 
 hillsides. The river itself, I found, had not the 
 doleful sublimity it has farther South, but rather 
 the limpid and gentle character of Northern streams 
 in summer.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF LINCOLN 
 
 SOME years ago I went to the State Fair at 
 Springfield, 111. The object of my visit was 
 to see the horses there, and I wrote an account 
 of them for a magazine. But while there I became 
 more than ever interested in another subject. Lin 
 coln is the most representative and characteristic of 
 American great men. In no other man does the 
 national character see itself so illustrated and digni 
 fied. The description of his mind and nature will 
 always be an inviting task to the American. I do 
 not doubt that in the future every artist, every poet, 
 every critic, will wish to try his hand at him. I be 
 came possessed of a strong desire to try mine. 
 
 Certainly the visitor to Springfield does not forget 
 that he lived there. Wherever I went I could feel 
 the presence of that mighty and kindly shade, which 
 seemed to stand in the midst of the flat country, like 
 some colossal monument visible everywhere. The 
 character of the country itself, it seemed to me, was 
 appropriate to Lincoln. His people had come west 
 ward over the Virginia and Kentucky mountains, 
 and after various sojournings in Kentucky and In 
 diana, had found their way to this region. The mi 
 gration was a fortunate one. This prairie country, 
 less fitted to please poets and artists than to breed 
 and raise men, was a more appropriate home for him 
 than any mountain region with hills too steep for 
 the plough would have been. His genius was nour 
 ished by the rude plenty and success of the new
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 121 
 
 country. The contagious well-being and happiness 
 of the thrifty, money-producing neighborhood were 
 good for him. The power and audacity of his humor, 
 that humor, which had something of the reckless 
 wealth of the prairie vegetation, I thought, was in 
 some degree the result of a bringing up among a suc 
 cessful and a happy people. 
 
 Then for his education in knowledge of men and 
 in the acquisition of skill in their control, the society 
 that occupied as much of level country as could be 
 seen from the court-house cupola was sufficient. 
 What better training as an observer and leader of 
 men and as a politician could he have had than was 
 afforded him by his daily business of advising farmers 
 who came to consult with him about their affairs 
 and of dealing with and handling juries. Men are 
 much the same everywhere and may be learned as 
 well in one place as another. Young men are apt to 
 think that knowing men means wide travel or know 
 ing celebrated people or people who are in the news 
 papers; whereas some old rustic, who has rarely been 
 out of sight of his own village, may know men far 
 better than much travelled people or so-called men 
 of the world, because he has the head and the eyes 
 for the study. 
 
 I tried to learn something from the older people 
 of Lincoln in his everyday life in Springfield. But 
 I heard only this at first hand. A lawyer, who had 
 been as a young man in Lincoln's office, said to me: 
 "Old man Lincoln thought a good deal of money. 
 When we were on a case together and the jury were 
 out and the client in court, Lincoln would say: 'You 
 had better try and get your money now. If the jury 
 comes in with a verdict for him, you won't get any-
 
 122 A Virginian Village 
 
 thing.'" This, as he said, was "fatherly" on the 
 part of Lincoln. He did not wish the youngster to 
 lose his money. 
 
 This country had another celebrated man, who 
 was very unlike Lincoln, the type, indeed, of men 
 who are just the reverse of him. It is odd that these 
 two men should have come from the same neighbor 
 hood, one the most constructive and beneficent of 
 American statesmen, the other the man who, whether 
 from blindness and want of foresight or because he 
 preferred his own ambitions to the interests of his 
 country, did more harm than any other man who 
 ever lived in the country. When I was a boy at 
 school in Washington, I often saw Stephen A. Doug 
 las. He was a very short man, almost a dwarf. 
 But he had more presence in his five feet one than 
 Lincoln had in his six feet four. At least that was 
 my boyish impression. It is perhaps true that men 
 of his kind are more likely to have this gift than 
 men of observation and humor like Lincoln, who are 
 made to see rather than be seen; men like Douglas 
 have it, as the unconscious powers of nature have it, 
 as strong animals, such as lions and bulls, have it. 
 He was at that day the most talked of candidate for 
 President, but there were people who said he would 
 never be President because his coat-tails were too 
 near the ground. His diminutiveness, however, was 
 chiefly in stature, due to the shortness of his legs. 
 His shoulders were broad and his chest deep. Above 
 a short neck was set a noble head and powerful 
 countenance, the strong features corrugated with 
 thought and force of character. His whole bearing 
 showed the custom of command and of a universally 
 conceded kingship. He had the negligent ease of
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 123 
 
 manner to be observed in men to whom such a posi 
 tion is allowed. "Easy as an old shoe" I have heard 
 a woman who knew him describe him a quality, 
 by the way, especially agreeable to women, who are 
 pleased by implied, rather than expressed, strength 
 in men. 
 
 I say he was a type of that class of men and politi 
 cians who are the reverse of the far rarer type to 
 which Lincoln belonged. He was a man of the mo 
 ment, of expedients, half-truths lies, if you like 
 to express it extremely. I have heard him in the 
 Senate Chamber fib by the hour with vigor and elo 
 quence. It was when he was spreading his sails to 
 win the Southern favor, which he had lost by his 
 opposition to the Lecompton Constitution. 
 
 If Douglas was a type of men who speak with 
 reference to the situation rather than with an eye 
 upon the truth, Lincoln was one of the kind of men 
 who necessarily speak the truth. That he was very 
 truthful has been widely remarked of him. For one 
 thing, he was a man of genius, and men of genius 
 are apt to speak the truth; this because of their 
 greater mental fineness, and because they see the 
 truth clearly. Not only are they apt to speak the 
 truth, but they are inept at telling lies that is, they 
 usually are. Then Lincoln belonged to the class of 
 humorists, and they are, I fancy, the least skilful of 
 all liars. The manner of the humorist is to compare 
 the motions of his own mind with a standard of 
 truth and right; the staple of his humor is largely a 
 sense of the discrepancy between these detected 
 motions and truth. He is thus always watching 
 himself, and is the last man to be deceived as to the 
 real nature of the processes of his mind, and to be-
 
 124 A Virginian Village 
 
 come one of the scarcely conscious speakers of false 
 hood. Lying is a gift. The Pathfinder says to the 
 young man in Cooper's novel, speaking upon the 
 subject of falsehoods: "I know your gifts don't lie 
 that away." Lincoln's gifts did not lie that way. 
 It is told of him in Nicolay and Hay's "Life" that 
 he was engaged with a Judge Parks as counsel for a 
 man accused of larceny, whom he believed guilty. 
 He said to Judge Parks: "If you can say anything 
 for the man, do it; if I attempt it, the jury will see 
 that I think he is guilty and convict him." It was 
 Lincoln's good fortune that the gift he had suited his 
 time. It was the day of truth. In our ordinary 
 work-a-day world the half-truths, the evasions, for 
 the most part have it, and it is perhaps right that it 
 should be so. But the period of 1855-1865 was an 
 exception. 
 
 One other relation Lincoln had with truth. Any 
 one must observe the good taste with which he spoke. 
 It was because he had such a mind for truth that he 
 spoke so. An education is spoken of as "liberal," I 
 suppose, because it affords its possessor a liberation 
 from'Yhe illusions and misconceptions of uneducated 
 men. In Lincoln's case it was the truth that accom 
 plished what Greek and Latin do for other men. It 
 was the truth that made him free. Truth was the 
 thread of Theseus, by holding to which he found his 
 way with sureness and safety through those laby 
 rinths of misconception and vulgarity in which the 
 unlearned are so often lost. If you would see in what 
 bad taste and with what misconception an unedu 
 cated man of genius can write, read some of the prose 
 writing of Burns. Lincoln having such a mind as he 
 had, was it necessary that he should know Greek
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 125 
 
 and Latin before he should be able to express cor 
 rectly what he saw in mankind and human life? 
 "Come," I have fancied such a person saying to him 
 from Oxford, "you have three words to one of mine. 
 Yes, and you have culture, which must be a fine 
 thing, and I recognize that your words have a grace 
 and finish, as if breathed upon by influences from 
 an enchanted past that is strange to me; but shall 
 you therefore see life and man more strongly than 
 I, or express the truth more closely than I can do in 
 that vernacular which I have learned from a child?" 
 
 He is universally recognized as very American. 
 I remember that Mr. James Bryce in his book on 
 this country has picked out two qualities as espe 
 cially American. He says that no people abhor cruelty 
 as the Americans do, and that in no other country 
 is the sense of humor so widespread. Both of these 
 qualities Lincoln had very strongly. Everyone 
 knows how merciful he was. Spies and deserters 
 were continually being sentenced to death. His 
 sense of duty compelled him in some cases to let 
 these sentences stand, but he was always reluctant 
 to do so. He got out of it where he could. It is 
 probable that he did not have the mighty faith in the 
 efficacy of hemp and lead that a professional soldier 
 has. But of course the real cause was the merciful 
 ness of his heart. There are on record innumerable 
 illustrations of this quality of his. The following 
 is an incident of which I had personal knowledge. 
 
 During the Christmas vacation of the last winter 
 of the war I had an opportunity to go to the front 
 for the Christian Commission. I had thus a chance 
 to visit City Point. While there, one Sunday even 
 ing in a restaurant, I heard a chaplain relate this
 
 126 A Virginian Village 
 
 incident. He was a red-headed little man, of a 
 sanguine complexion, very vulgar, but evidently 
 with a good heart and a great deal of vigor and full 
 of red blood. Two young men in his regiment, who 
 were deserters, were to be shot. On the day before 
 that set for the execution, he went to Washington to 
 try to save the lives of these men. Lincoln was 
 standing in his office, surrounded by people, and very 
 busy. The chaplain got a place in the crowd about 
 Lincoln. An attendant presently came in and said 
 to Lincoln, "The mother of one of those men who 
 are to be shot to-morrow is outside." Lincoln cried 
 out angrily, "There is no use of her coming here 
 crying about me. I can't do anything for her." 
 The chaplain here stepped forward and said, "I 
 have come here about those men." He said they 
 were very young men. "Well," said Lincoln, "sup 
 pose they were old men, with families to support, 
 would that make it any better?" But the chaplain 
 said that he did not ask for the men's lives on the 
 ground of reason and justice. " I put it on the ground 
 of mercy," he said, and he exhorted the President 
 with a fervor practiced in addressing innumerable 
 religious bodies, and which, because it came right 
 from the heart, I could see must have been most 
 effective. Presently Lincoln, his feelings in the 
 meanwhile, as the man could see, working strongly 
 within him, called out, "Orderly, telegraph General 
 
 to stop that execution until he hears from 
 
 me." The men were not shot. 
 
 Theoretically I don't suppose such action as this 
 can be justified. He ought to have given the man an 
 emphatic refusal, and that is what almost any good 
 man of business would have done. But that he
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 127 
 
 found it so difficult to do this is a characteristic of 
 Lincoln which must always endear him to the hearts 
 of the people. His chief motive, as has been said, 
 was his natural mercifulness. But he doubted the 
 wisdom of the policy of severity in favor with mili 
 tary men. He probably thought it another sort of 
 red tape. Once they arranged to shoot twenty 
 deserters at one time. Very red tape that would 
 have been. A general went to Washington to make 
 a vigorous protest to Lincoln against his expected 
 interference. "It is no use, general," said Lincoln, " I 
 won't do it." Lincoln was as wise as he was humane 
 in refusing to consent to such a proceeding. The effect 
 on enlistments would surely have been unfavorable. 
 It would have helped resistance to the draft. The 
 President, of course, had to see over the whole field. 
 The general was thinking only of the effect on the 
 army. But even there it is questionable whether 
 the effect would have been good. It would have 
 been of the nature of an insult to the honest private 
 soldier, who was, after all, doing the whole thing, 
 to intimate to him that he was in need of such a 
 drastic reminder of his duty. Lincoln believed that 
 kindness and forbearance would be more efficacious. 
 Humor is the other American characteristic which 
 Mr. Bryce fixes upon, and it was one of Lincoln's 
 marked traits. He is the most humorous figure in 
 our history. None of our great political men before 
 him, with the exception of Franklin, have been re 
 markable for this quality. It is not a quality you 
 expect to find in a statesman, although some of the 
 very great men, like Cromwell and Frederick, have 
 had it. Humor, certainly of the kind his was, is not 
 favorable to greatness in action. In many cases it
 
 128 A Virginian Village 
 
 affects the strength of will of men. It is very apt 
 to weaken ambition in men. On the other hand, the 
 want of it often seems to increase their force and 
 efficiency. It was so in the case of Sumner, no doubt. 
 Anyone must have noticed, for instance, that sen 
 timental people are apt to have strong wills. The 
 fact that Lincoln's possession of this quality in no 
 way affected the serious strength of his character or 
 his vigor as a man of action is an indication of his 
 greatness. 
 
 A humorist he certainly was. Upon the question 
 of just how good he was in that way men will differ. 
 Our national pride might lead us to wish to put him 
 as a great humorous hero by the side of Swift. I 
 doubt whether we can do that on the strength of 
 such well-authenticated specimens of his humor as 
 are recorded. They are good, no doubt, but scarcely 
 so good as those ancient favorites "Dearly Beloved 
 Roger" or the story of the "Meditation on a Broom 
 stick." Regarding the most widely quoted of the 
 jokes attributed to him, that he proposed to send 
 a barrel of the whiskey drunk by General Grant to 
 every general in the army, which Mr. Brooks claims 
 for him, an old friend of mine, the late Moses F. 
 Odell, once asked Lincoln if this joke was his. "No," 
 he said, "that is too good for me." It is what I 
 should have expected. The best things are usually 
 anonymous. This particular joke dates from much 
 before Lincoln's day. 
 
 But there are plenty of good things that are 
 Lincoln's, of which the following are perhaps as good 
 as any. Ben Wade was one of Lincoln's many 
 "candid friends." The only one of these, however, 
 whom Lincoln really minded, was, I believe, Sumner.
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 129 
 
 It is natural for a man of genius to dislike a fanatic. 
 Men of genius have a natural intuitive moderation 
 and common sense something like that which women 
 have, and it is a quality which women have, the 
 wild behavior of certain English ladies to the con 
 trary notwithstanding. Ben Wade once said to him: 
 "Mr. President, I have come to tell you that your 
 government is going straight to hell; you're within 
 a mile of it now!" "Well, Senator," said Lincoln, 
 "I believe that is about the distance from here to 
 the Capitol." A well-known writer relates that when 
 a boy he attended a reception given to Lincoln near 
 the close of the war at the Union League Club in 
 Philadelphia. A line of people was passing Lincoln 
 and shaking his hand. Just ahead of the youth was 
 a well-known local bore, who, of course, had to take 
 advantage of the occasion to make something like a 
 speech. He said: "I am glad to take the hand of the 
 man who, with the help of Almighty God, put down 
 this unholy rebellion." Lincoln twigged his man in a 
 minute. "You're half right, sir," said he; "you're 
 half right. Pass on, sir; please don't keep the line 
 waiting." 
 
 The following may not be worth telling where 
 there are so many better things about him to be had, 
 but it comes to me at first hand and it shows his ac 
 cessibility and friendliness and that humorous dis 
 position which was always near at hand with him. A 
 tax had been levied on oxen. An owner of a pair 
 came to Lincoln, who had more on his shoulders 
 than any other man in the world, to see if he would 
 not help him to get rid of the tax. Lincoln knew the 
 man, and remembered the oxen, and said, "Are 
 those the oxen I see standing at the corner when-
 
 130 A Virginian Village 
 
 ever I go to the Treasury? I never saw them move. 
 Maybe they're not movable property. Perhaps we 
 may get them put down as real estate." In this 
 incident Lincoln appears in a patriarchal character, 
 which was certainly his, reminding us of an Oriental 
 prince seated at the gate of his palace, or rather of 
 the representation of one in a comic opera. 
 
 If this and many of the things recorded of him do 
 not seem remarkable in themselves and when looked 
 at separately from him, I may say, that, like so 
 many of the utterances and the actions of the great, 
 they resemble sea-water, which is colorless when held 
 up in a glass, but is blue when seen in the vast ocean. 
 
 We only know of the humor of Lincoln as a man of 
 mature years. I should have liked to hear him when 
 he was young, careless, and obscure, as Senator 
 McDougall heard him, on the back porch of a prairie 
 hotel in Illinois. The incident is related to me by a 
 gentleman who vouches for the truth of it. I give 
 it in his words. He tells the story as illustrating the 
 union in Lincoln of a wild mirth with his well-known 
 constitutional melancholy. 
 
 "When Senator McDougall, of California, was a 
 young lawyer in Troy, N. Y., he was sent to attend to 
 a suit in Illinois. He arrived at the country town late 
 in the afternoon, and after supper listened for an 
 hour to Western stories told by a tall young man 
 to a group of idlers on the porch, which elicited 
 shouts of laughter, in which the narrator loudly 
 joined. McDougall went to bed in a double-bedded 
 room, and, when the occupant of the other bed 
 appeared, it proved to be the tall young man, 
 Lincoln, who took a seat on the side of Mc- 
 Dougall's bed and asked questions, which were an-
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 131 
 
 swered in a cheerful tone. Lincoln then told his own 
 life history. He had tried farming, log-rolling, boat 
 ing, and finally practicing law, but all had been fail 
 ures. He thought that the Lord was against him. 
 McDougall said he talked like one on the verge of sui 
 cide, and it seemed hardly possible that it was the 
 same man who an hour before had laughed so bois 
 terously at his own jokes." 
 
 Another American characteristic that Lincoln had 
 was a keenness of direct perception. He was a man 
 of intuitions and direct perceptions. This is an 
 American characteristic. A keen, attentive way of 
 looking out is, I think, an American quality. 
 
 He was an American also in appearance, of the tall, 
 lean type which is supposed to belong to this coun 
 try. It is often said that the American type of face 
 and figure is getting to resemble that of an Indian. 
 It is reasonable to expect that it will be so more and 
 more, the Indian being the natural result of the 
 physical conditions of this country. I for one do not 
 regret this, for that race is physically a fine one. 
 They have not only strong physiques, but strong 
 countenances as well. Nowhere do you see more 
 powerful features features that show more natural 
 strength, physical, and in a sense moral than among 
 the best specimens of the Indian race. Lincoln's 
 face and figure were not unlike this type. He was 
 very dark and he had the high cheek-bones of an 
 Indian, and in some degree an Indian cast of features. 
 
 The man with whom his name is constantly men 
 tioned, and with whom it is natural to compare him, 
 is Washington. It is surely remarkable that we 
 should have had in our short history two such char 
 acters. In a thousand years England has had only
 
 132 A Virginian Village 
 
 one, Alfred, and he is almost legendary. Washington 
 was, of course, a man of much less salient character 
 istics than Lincoln. The young Chastellux found 
 his distinction to be in the harmonious blending of 
 his characteristics, rather than in the existence of 
 marked special qualities. 
 
 It is not difficult to guess which of the two men, 
 Washington or Lincoln, will be the greater favorite 
 with women. How Mrs. Abigail Adams, with her 
 artless eighteenth-century vivacity, expresses the 
 admiration with which she saw Washington review 
 the troops at Cambridge! At a dinner which Wash 
 ington gave shortly before retiring from the pres 
 idency, when he arose and spoke of his approaching 
 retirement, the British minister's wife, who was pres 
 ent, burst into tears. Another lady, a very attractive 
 young woman, a Miss Greene, who has left an ac 
 count of her first meeting with Washington, has told 
 us that she wept upon this occasion. One wonders just 
 how agreeable this could have been to Mrs. Wash 
 ington, who was present. Washington had beauty, 
 and had besides the gift of looking great. Of this 
 gift of making a fine public appearance Lincoln had 
 none. I was jammed in the crowd in front of the 
 Astor House, when Lincoln, standing up in a ba 
 rouche and bowing to the crowd, was driven down 
 Broadway. This was when he was on his way to 
 Washington to be inaugurated. He looked very 
 good-natured and anxious to please, but the figure 
 he presented was ungainly, certainly not imposing. 
 His beard, which about the time of his election he had 
 allowed to grow, disguised the lower part of his face, 
 the carving of which was singularly fine, the line of 
 the chin having a fine sweep and the fall of the cheek
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 133 
 
 nervously and strongly chiselled. He had not the 
 kind of looks to impress a crowd, although I am sure 
 he must have looked great to those who saw him 
 intimately and who had eyes to see. 
 
 Ladies did not weep when they met Lincoln. One 
 might guess that he was not especially endowed with 
 the power of pleasing them. I have received from a 
 lady, and give below, an account of an interview 
 which she had with Lincoln, which will give an idea of 
 the way in which women regarded him during his 
 lifetime. Of course, they would think differently of 
 him now in the vast fame into which he has come, 
 for they love fame. Perhaps I should say something 
 about the writer. She was at that time a brilliant 
 and handsome girl. She was such a character as 
 only appears in times of great public agitation, when 
 people's minds are full of exciting ideas. Her char 
 acteristics were an intense sympathy with any kind 
 of suffering, whether of human beings or of animals 
 (at that time, of course, her whole heart was with the 
 slaves), transparent, impulsive honesty, great ardor 
 of feeling, and a very high, courageous tone. 
 
 "We made our call, which was by prearrangement, 
 on the President. I think it was the autumn of '64. 
 There were three or four of us. The call was made 
 about twelve o'clock, noon. At the door we had a 
 slight altercation with the servant, who said the 
 President would not or could not see anyone that 
 day. One of our number, the Hon. Robert Dale 
 Owen, once our minister to Naples, and a former 
 congressman, was a personal friend of Mr. Lincoln. 
 The President gave us a cordial welcome, and seemed 
 annoyed when we told him that the servant had re 
 fused to admit us. He was cordial to us, extremely
 
 134 A Virginian Village 
 
 so, and, on hearing that I was an abolitionist and had 
 once manumitted a few slaves, he addressed the most 
 of his conversation to me and, as I was young, wild, 
 and chatty, he seemed amused and perhaps pleased 
 at my audacity. He asked me what I thought the 
 best way to destroy slavery. I quickly replied, 'It 
 is always well to do right, without delay and on the 
 instant.' He smiled ironically, saying that that 
 could not be right, to do things without reason or 
 order, to which I replied: 'Mr. William Lloyd Gar 
 rison, the greatest man that had ever lived [again he 
 smiled] has informed me that there could be no delay 
 or tarrying in doing right or in rendering justice.' 
 The President said, as he patted me on the shoulder, 
 'What a little enthusiast you are! I am neither a red 
 nor a black Republican.' 'I am both,' was my reply. 
 'So I perceive,' was his rejoinder. He seemed both 
 amused and startled at my intensity, and when taking 
 leave of us, he again patted me on the shoulder and 
 said: 'I like your enthusiasm and earnestness. I 
 hope we shall meet again.' Alas, I never saw him 
 again. I might have told you in confidence that 
 during the interview Mr. Lincoln sat with his foot 
 and leg lifted on a rather high table." 
 
 The charitable reader will attribute the peculiarity 
 of manners mentioned in the last sentence of the 
 above quoted remarks to his origin and bringing up. 
 I don't believe that. It seems to me that it was a 
 personal deficiency of his own. 
 
 One hears now and then objections to the position 
 which people of this country have given Lincoln. 
 An eminent English critic has ventured the remark 
 that he had no distinction. If he means class dis 
 tinction and I think an idea something like this is in
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 135 
 
 his mind of course not. That he was a gentleman, 
 however, I am sure. Genius tends to make gentle 
 men of plain men, just as it tends to make men who 
 belong by birth to the other end of society plainer 
 and more human, by freeing them from that narrow 
 ness and rash superficiality which is their besetting 
 fault. His goodness, his sincerity, his clear percep 
 tions (all gentleman-like qualities) made impossible 
 for him those pretenses which are such a fruitful 
 source of vulgarity. Class distinction, of course, he 
 had not. But if by distinction is meant individuality, 
 an unmistakable peculiarity and identity, what great 
 man of history had more of it? What a contrast he 
 presents in this respect to the great contemporary 
 English statesman, Gladstone. The Englishman re 
 minds one of those California peaches that are so 
 large and handsome but have little flavor. There 
 was little in his mind that was peculiar. Gladstone 
 seems to have been anybody else raised to the n th 
 power. Lincoln, on the other hand, both in his ut 
 terances and his nature, possessed a marked peculiar 
 ity. The quality which I have mentioned above as 
 Lincoln's might be called by any one of half a dozen 
 names; "distinction" or "peculiarity" would an 
 swer. Anyone will know what I mean. A great 
 statesman almost always has this quality. Napoleon 
 had it; Cromwell had it. But I don't see that the 
 quality is necessary to make a great statesman. It is 
 not at all the same thing as a power to acquire knowl 
 edge or even as intellectual power. If a statesman 
 has the power to know what should be known and 
 to judge this knowledge and to act upon this judg 
 ment, why is that not enough? It was enough in 
 Gladstone's case. It is not difficult to think of great
 
 136 A Virginian Village 
 
 statesmen besides Gladstone who did not have this 
 quality. In our history I think that Hamilton was 
 such a man. He is admittedly one of the greatest 
 American statesmen. Yet I should doubt if he had 
 this peculiarity of mind of which I speak. He cer 
 tainly did not have another quality that always goes 
 with this peculiarity, which I might call visibility or 
 familiarity. Where a man has a peculiar mind, the 
 world can see him very clearly. I think the country 
 does not have a clear sense of the personality of 
 Hamilton. The people believe him to be great, be 
 cause of what he achieved in connection with the 
 early history of the nation. But they do not see him. 
 Nor did he have another quality, which almost al 
 ways goes with the peculiar mind, literary power, the 
 power of interesting speech that reaches the minds of 
 men, such as Napoleon or Lincoln or Bismarck had. 
 Hamilton has left eleven big volumes, but not a sen 
 tence or a phrase of it all, so far as I know, has got 
 into popular mind. If you look in Bartlett's "Fa 
 miliar Quotations," under "Hamilton" you will 
 find what Webster, a literary man, said about Ham 
 ilton ("He struck the dry rock of public credit," 
 etc.), but not a word of Hamilton's. 
 
 Unlike certain great men, you understand Lin 
 coln. It by no means follows that, because a man 
 has great peculiarity and visibility, that we see him 
 in the sense of understanding him. Napoleon is 
 externally the most visible of men, but you do not 
 understand him. That is perhaps the great fascina 
 tion of him. He is such a conundrum. The con 
 stant additions that are being made to our knowledge 
 of what he did and said do not seem to have made 
 his mind any clearer to us.
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 137 
 
 But we feel that we comprehend Lincoln. I think 
 one reason of that is that he was an honest man and 
 a good man. As you take him by the hand and look 
 into his eyes, you feel that you know him. If you 
 were having any kind of a business transaction with 
 him, you would feel that you knew where you were. 
 With Napoleon, of course, you would not know that 
 at all. Perhaps the difference between the good 
 great men and the bad great men is that you under 
 stand the former and do not understand the latter. 
 It is hard to understand the bad men, because they 
 are so much less simple than the good. No man 
 being wholly bad, the bad men are such a mixture 
 and so hard to unravel. 
 
 And yet the mind of Lincoln has its mysteries. 
 How difficult it would be to understand by what 
 power it is that he is able to know when to act and 
 when to wait! That power of choosing the moment 
 for action, which the world agrees was his, how can 
 you explain that? Of course, you may say that 
 this knowledge is the result of an intense study of 
 the situation by a powerful mind. Or you may say 
 that it is a genius. Can you get any nearer to it 
 than that? Lincoln seems to have had something 
 like the "demon," of Socrates, an inner light to 
 which he looked for instruction. 
 
 One gets a little tired of the uniformity of lauda 
 tion with which Lincoln is so often spoken of. There 
 is a good deal of gush, and now and then something 
 like cant in what one hears. In particular there can 
 be no merit in the doctoring of contemporaneous 
 impressions to suit the taste of later times. If men 
 are telling us of their relations with Lincoln during 
 his lifetime, they should tell us what they thought
 
 138 A Virginian Village 
 
 then. Mr. C. F. Adams, in his life of his father, has 
 given us his father's contemporaneous impressions, 
 and he is to be thanked for doing so. They are very 
 interesting. He describes an interview which his 
 father had with Lincoln early in 1861. 
 
 Mr. Seward took Mr. Adams, who had just been 
 appointed minister to England, to call upon the 
 President. In the writer's words: "Presently a door 
 opened, and a tall, large-featured, shabbily-dressed 
 man, of uncouth appearance, slouched into the 
 room." Mr. Adams, having been introduced by the 
 Secretary, expressed his thanks for the appointment 
 in the usual manner. Lincoln said that the thanks 
 were not due to him, but to Mr. Seward, upon whose 
 recommendation the appointment was made. Then, 
 we were informed, he swung his long arms to his 
 head with an air of great relief, and said: "Well, 
 Governor, I have this morning decided the Chicago 
 post-office appointment." That was all he had to 
 say. Mr. Adams was very much shocked and never 
 got over the impression this first interview made 
 upon him. To the admirer of Lincoln, however, 
 Lincoln's behavior upon this occasion will seem to 
 have been very much in character, and he will con 
 tinue to be as fond and proud of him as before. 
 
 What was there that was necessary to say that 
 Mr. Adams's task would be one of great delicacy 
 and difficulty, that the course he would pursue 
 would depend upon the way in which events should 
 shape themselves or some such remark? Didn't 
 Mr. Adams know all this? The spring of 1861 in 
 Washington was no time for making conversation, 
 and I doubt whether Lincoln could ever have been 
 very good at that. Why not speak of the Chicago
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 139 
 
 post-office? It was business that had to be done. 
 Didn't he say himself that he was like a man who 
 was too busy letting out rooms at one end of the 
 house to extinguish the fire that was raging at the 
 other? 
 
 The facts are as given above, but it is seldom that 
 one meets with an interview between two distin 
 guished characters that is so interesting, and I may 
 be permitted a little guess work of my own upon it. 
 Lincoln's manner, we are told, was "shy and con 
 strained." With his eyes, we may be sure that he 
 knew at a glance that his visitor was a considerable 
 person. He was probably not blind to the dignified 
 bearing and quiet, simple distinction of Mr. Adams, 
 and he was very likely not insensible to his name and 
 connections. In those days to people on the prairies 
 Boston and things Bostonian looked very polite and 
 superior. We may be sure also that Lincoln, with 
 his keen susceptibilities, was aware that he was him 
 self misjudged, and this did not tend to make him 
 less "shy and constrained." Of course, a practiced 
 man of the world no, I won't say that, for, in the 
 truest and deepest sense of the term, it would be hard 
 to find a better man of the world than Lincoln was 
 but a man accustomed to the usages of good society 
 would have concealed this, and such Lincoln was not. 
 
 The writer of this biography has no doubt that 
 Lincoln was a great man, but reconciles the fact of 
 his greatness with the unfavorable impression re 
 ceived by Mr. Adams by the consideration that the 
 Lincoln who had received the education of four years 
 of office was a different man from the Lincoln Mr. 
 Adams met in the spring of 1861. A simpler ex 
 planation, and that which will commend itself to
 
 140 A Virginian Village 
 
 most readers, is that Mr. Adams was mistaken. He 
 was neither by nature nor training the kind of man 
 to understand Lincoln. 
 
 It is interesting to inquire what would have been 
 the effect upon the fame and position of Lincoln if 
 things had happened differently from the way they 
 did happen. Suppose he had not been nominated, 
 and someone else had been nominated and elected. 
 I believe he would have remained the most interest 
 ing personality of the time, owing to his literary 
 gifts and his gifts of leadership. There was no man 
 who spoke with such genius. There were eloquent 
 writers and speakers, but none had his insight and 
 power of consummate expression. If he had gone 
 into the Senate, which he preferred to the presidency 
 (and that is no doubt what he would have done), he 
 would probably have been the wisest and most un 
 selfish counsellor and supporter of the Government, 
 and the most trusted leader and adviser of the people, 
 and, when the day of restoration came, the chief 
 restorer. We should have had the leader and the 
 seer and the consummate speaker. But we should 
 not have had, what is perhaps the greatest Lincoln, 
 the enduring, silent man of action and responsibility. 
 
 But suppose him President and that the South had 
 won. What effect would the victory of the South 
 have had upon his fame? I remember well during 
 the war there was a close connection between the 
 military success of the North and the apparent 
 greatness of Lincoln. When the Union arms were 
 successful, the figure of the President, with that visi 
 bility in which he was so gifted, would loom up very 
 large; on the other hand, when defeat came, the 
 figure would dwindle and fall into a kind of dilapida-
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 141 
 
 tion. But that was because, although he was so 
 familiar to us, we did not really know him. But 
 now that we know him so well, probably better 
 than any man was ever known before in the world's 
 history, what bearing has success had upon his fame? 
 Or rather, what would have been the effect upon the 
 fame of the victory of the South ? There is no doubt 
 that victory is very becoming to a great man, and 
 we are glad that the fame of our hero has received 
 this final ornament. But if after 1864 the North 
 had failed, Lincoln would have still been the same 
 man we know now, the seer, the genius, and the mas 
 ter of consummate speech, and the silent man of 
 business and action. His qualities, it may be said, 
 are of a kind that would still be interesting in ad 
 versity. That is by no means true of all great men. 
 Napoleon, for instance, is chiefly interesting in a 
 palace or at the head of his victorious armies. Not 
 withstanding the fact, which I presume to be a fact, 
 that it is scarcely possible to get too much of a great 
 man, that one almost always wants more, I fancy it 
 is easy to get too much of Napoleon at St. Helena. 
 The fact, of the truth of which I am assured, that 
 there is a great deal of perfectly authentic informa 
 tion about Napoleon at St. Helena existing in manu 
 script which is not published because it is not thought 
 that the world would be interested in reading it, 
 would seem to be proof of this. But we are sure 
 that the interest and affections of men would have 
 followed Lincoln into retirement after defeat. Of 
 course, I do not mean to say to the same extent as 
 now; constituted as men are, it is not possible to 
 suppose that. 
 
 I saw him several times, but I met him only once
 
 142 A Virginian Village 
 
 face to face. It was during the Christmas holidays 
 of the winter of 1864-65. I was in Washington for a 
 vacation, and went to the White House one evening 
 at the usual weekly public reception. I followed the 
 crowd and the President gave me, as I passed him, 
 a limp shake of the hand. Later in the evening, 
 after the greater part of the people had gone, I was 
 walking through the rooms, and I entered one in 
 which I came upon Lincoln sitting in a chair. I 
 think there was only one other person in the room 
 sitting with him. Lincoln was evidently resting and 
 was sitting in a posture which, though easy and com 
 fortable, was dignified and, it seemed to me, refined. 
 The expression of his countenance was pleasant, not 
 tired and sad, as one often hears, cheerful rather. 
 It was after his second election. Sheridan had been 
 victorious in the Valley and Savannah had fallen, 
 and the end was in sight. The plot was working 
 toward the final chapter, when the good characters, 
 great and small, should be made happy forever, 
 and even the naughty and defeated were to be dis 
 missed with that magnanimity usual in last chapters. 
 In particular, what a pleasing future is to be assigned 
 the chief hero. With the perfect confidence of his 
 countrymen, and with vast personal authority, he 
 is about to enter upon that work of pacification and 
 restoration for which his qualities are so eminently 
 fitted. All this seemed to be expressed in his face and 
 figure. His eyes met mine for a moment, and his 
 countenance wore a slightly quizzical expression, as 
 if somewhat amused at the eagerness with which I no 
 doubt regarded him. I had not come into the room 
 meaning to look at him, or knowing that he was there; 
 but coming upon him suddenly, I dare say I took a
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 143 
 
 good look at him. But his expression was very 
 friendly, and I thought he looked out of his eyes, 
 not as a statesman or a man of business does, but 
 rather like an artist or humorist. I might perfectly 
 well have known him, if I had taken the trouble. 
 I have always heard he liked young people. There 
 was an honest youth, at that time connected with 
 the Christian Commission in Washington, who made 
 his acquaintance in this manner. He was anxious 
 to get the use of transports to take some things to 
 the front. He tried to get them at the War Depart 
 ment, but was denied. An officer who had heard 
 him make the application followed him out and said : 
 "I am a soldier, and cannot say anything to con 
 travene the views of my superiors, but there is noth 
 ing to prevent my pointing," and he pointed in the 
 direction of the White House. The young man ac 
 cordingly went there, and got admission to Lincoln, 
 who said, "Well, young fellow, what do you want?" 
 He told him, and Lincoln said: "You had better 
 leave that to me. I'll tell you what to do." Lincoln, 
 I dare say, in an instant "twigged" the situation, 
 recognizing with a humorous side-glance the natural 
 feeling of the officials of the War Department that 
 the work of these outside commissions was a reflection 
 upon themselves. He was great upon the things to 
 make note of without comment, and loved the mix-up 
 of motives in people's minds. The young man told 
 me the story thus: "I said, 'There is nothing I should 
 like better than to have you tell me, Mr. President!' 
 He saw I was not a bit stuck on myself, and seemed 
 pleased. He said, 'You go to Secretary Welles,' 
 (giving him some details as to how to proceed), 
 'but be sure not to tell him I sent you.' " The young
 
 144 A Virginian Village 
 
 man went to the Secretary and got what he wanted. 
 He went afterward to Lincoln, and reported the 
 successful issue of the matter, and Lincoln said: 
 "Mind, when you get into such a scrape again, you 
 come to me." 
 
 Lincoln was fond of doing things of this sort. 
 One would think that he would have wished to avoid 
 the bother of such small matters. But it is likely 
 that he found a relief in them from more trying busi 
 ness. He was always looking for such distractions. 
 One of the greatest bores I ever knew once told me 
 that Lincoln said to him that he might come to see 
 him when he liked, and told of a certain knock which 
 he (Lincoln) would recognize. Besides being a great 
 bore, this individual was a very foolish man. I 
 have scarcely ever known in my life a man I could 
 without hesitation call a fool that is, a man with 
 such an excess of folly as to separate him sharply 
 from the mass of his fellow-creatures. I don't know 
 that he was such a man, but he was certainly very 
 foolish. He told me sadly that there was a frivolity 
 about Lincoln that depressed him. He said that 
 when he wished to speak to Lincoln seriously upon 
 the state of public affairs, Lincoln would always have 
 some absurd story to tell him. I can quite under 
 stand that Lincoln found a relief in the sociable 
 fatuity of this gentleman. 
 
 I went to the Tenth Street Museum when in Wash 
 ington, and saw many photographs of Lincoln. They 
 are all interesting, but two especially so. One is 
 by Hessler, taken in Chicago in 1859. There is no 
 beard, and you see the fine sweep of the lower part of 
 his face. A young lady who writes novels has lately 
 said that her hero had a jaw and a chin like the prow
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 145 
 
 of a ship. The outline of the lower part of Lin 
 coln's face is like that. But it is the expression in 
 the photograph of the countenance and the look out 
 of the eyes that is most interesting. Up to that time 
 he had been doing little but think and speak, and the 
 eyes are full of meditation and contemplation. They 
 have a sweet and steady and indolent power, a power 
 latent and asleep rather than in action the musing, 
 dreaming look of the poet and thinker. The ex 
 pression of the countenance is singularly lovely and 
 winsome, has a wonderful niceness. I have tried 
 hard to define the charm of that expression. It must 
 have been there. Lincoln's face must have worn at 
 that moment just that look. It is not the individual 
 fancy of some clever portrait painter that you see. 
 There is nothing but the sun between us and him. 
 There it is, and there it will remain to tantalize with 
 its elusive beauty the poets of distant ages in search 
 of a verbal equivalent. 
 
 The other was taken at City Point the Sunday 
 before his death. He is sharpening a pencil for Tad 
 and laughing. He looks tired and pale, but his face 
 is beaming with happiness and relief infinite re 
 lief, reminding one of Bishop Butler's remark that 
 the greatest happiness is the cessation of pain. 
 
 The relation of Lincoln to the boy Tad will always 
 be a subject of popular interest. I once spent an 
 hour in the company of Tad. He was then a young 
 fellow of eighteen or nineteen. He had a slight im 
 pediment in his speech, and his mind seemed to have 
 a kind of slowness and heaviness. But he was a 
 sensible fellow, and had a look of great honesty and 
 simple friendliness. I had a feeling that his nature 
 still felt the influence and reflected image of that
 
 146 A Virginian Village 
 
 great kindness which had shone upon his childhood. 
 A lady, who is Lincoln's descendant and in whose 
 countenance it was easy to trace the outlines of Lin 
 coln's features, told me, in speaking of Tad: "He was 
 a very nice boy, and his death was more than his 
 mother could stand. It was the last straw, and she 
 died." 
 
 I went over the house in Springfield in which he 
 lived, which is now public property, and which dur 
 ing certain hours is shown to visitors. Two iron 
 cannon stand in the yard behind the house. The 
 lady who showed me over the house was a relative of 
 Lincoln's family. She showed me a sofa where, 
 she said, "Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln did their courting." 
 If the homely phrase should offend you, I am not of 
 your way of thinking. The influences which moulded 
 Lincoln's character, the family ties, the relations of 
 "father, son, and brother," those "chanties" (Mil 
 ton's exquisite word) of the family life which, anyone 
 must have observed, impart to the eyes and voices 
 of men a peculiar seriousness and sincerity, are they 
 not matters of interest to all of us who would under 
 stand him? That kindness, too, which would face 
 the probability of an unhappy life rather than that 
 a woman should suffer was a part of his character, 
 and should not be overlooked. 
 
 I went to the grave, which is on the top of what 
 is a considerable rise of ground for that country. 
 It is somewhat apart from the town. A walk through 
 one of those sparse groves, bare of underbrush, which 
 belong to the Mississippi Valley, leads to it, and 
 numbers of the visitors to the fair were making the 
 pilgrimage. The monument over the tomb contains 
 a kind of museum, in which are shown relics relating
 
 Impressions of Lincoln 147 
 
 to Lincoln. I found something appropriate in the 
 casual and perhaps inadequate character of the struc 
 ture. It seemed to me to signify the silence and the 
 patience of death and to be a suggestion that the 
 task of raising a fitting memorial might be left to 
 the fulness of time and to some more ideal and per 
 fect future age, if such there is to be.
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF LOWELL 
 
 THE writer of this paper had for some four 
 years an official connection with Mr. Lowell 
 and, as would of course happen in seeing daily a man 
 of such marked qualities, formed a lively impression 
 of his character and genius. This he has sketched 
 here: 
 
 Perhaps the first quality which would have im 
 pressed anyone in Mr. Lowell was his youthfulness. 
 I have heard this trait remarked upon by numbers of 
 persons. There were several elements to be dis 
 tinguished in this quality. Lowell was a poet, and 
 poets are apt to keep their youth beyond other men. 
 It is also a common observation that men of superior 
 character of whom he was undoubtedly one 
 often retain their youthfulness in advanced years. 
 It is not difficult to mention persons in whom this 
 combination of elements exists, resulting in a youth 
 ful character of mind. Such a man as Matthew 
 Arnold had it to a marked degree, although in him 
 it was associated with an extraordinary personal 
 attractiveness. We see it also in the simplicity and 
 the brave eccentricity of Lord Tennyson's character, 
 as expressed in his later poems. Such persons, in 
 deed, seem to preserve a physical youth beyond 
 other people. An old lady, who was an intimate 
 friend of Carlyle's, has told me that Carlyle had an 
 eye of a peculiar color, a light blue, and that an eye 
 of this color almost always fades in old age, but that 
 Carlyle's eye retained in extreme age the bright
 
 Impressions of Lowell 149 
 
 color of youth. Mr. Lowell had the same combina 
 tion of youthful qualities which belonged to these 
 men, but I think that he had, over and beyond these, 
 a quality of youth which was his own. It seemed 
 to me that many of his traits might be referred to 
 this youthfulness, even those which were remarked 
 upon by people as foibles. He was, for instance, 
 fond of a style of paradoxical conversation. We 
 had been, I remember, to see a burlesque, in which 
 a policeman was made to act on the stage in a ridic 
 ulous manner. Mr. Lowell gravely maintained that 
 such an exhibition had a tendency to lower the pub 
 lic respect for authority, was contra bonos mores, 
 and that the Lord Chamberlain should have pro 
 hibited it. In this he was perfectly serious. He 
 was never better company than when in this vein, 
 and the habit of mind was to a great degree the re 
 sult of his elastic youthfulness. I have seen him 
 described in some of the English papers as having 
 a self-conscious manner. He had at times a some 
 what professorial air, but the boy was too strong in 
 him to leave much room for the professor. 
 
 It is odd that Mr. Lowell should have been dis 
 tinctively the Yankee poet; for I should not have 
 said that he had the Yankee characteristics. He 
 had a power of enjoyment which was not Yankee, a 
 power of enjoyment both mental and physical. He 
 liked good food, drink and tobacco, and was alto 
 gether very fond of the earth. He sometimes spoke 
 of this quality and said that he had upon his ear a 
 mark which is peculiar to the ear of the faun. One 
 might say also that he was without the proverbial 
 keen-sightedness of the Yankee. He did not im 
 press me as having this quality as an individual, nor
 
 150 A Virginian Village 
 
 do I find it in his writings, certainly not in his critical 
 writings. He had great qualities for the critic's 
 task. He had very wide reading. He said, for 
 instance, that for ten years he lay on his back and 
 did nothing but read. He had also a great feeling 
 for the romance of literature and learning, and he 
 had the same power of enjoyment in literature which 
 he had in life in general. But does he not appear in 
 his literary essays as an enjoying rather than a critical 
 reader? If, however, he had not what would be 
 called keen perceptions, he was also without that 
 acerbity which is apt to accompany such percep 
 tions. As became so prosperous and successful a 
 man, his judgments of men and things were very 
 gentle. 
 
 But if Mr. Lowell had not himself to any marked 
 degree the Yankee qualities, the world knows what 
 delight he took in the Yankee society and charac 
 teristics, and the great admiration he had for Yankee 
 wit. I remember his once telling me about meeting 
 somewhere on Cape Cod a native Yankee humorist. 
 He asked this man if he would have something to 
 drink. The man said, "I guess I'll have some of 
 Hawkins's whetstone." This was, no doubt, a cur 
 rent joke of the day, and had reference to a noted 
 temperance lecturer, named Hawkins, whose elo 
 quence was profanely said to be assisted by a par 
 ticular preparation of alcohol. Of that man, Mr. 
 Lowell said: "He was a real humorist. It was not 
 merely that he was funny to listen to. He knew he 
 was funny." Lowell was, of course, full of Yankee 
 stories, and told them admirably. One or two I 
 have heard him tell come into my mind as I write. 
 One day a man came into the office who was a neigh-
 
 Impressions of Lowell 151 
 
 bor of Lowell's in Cambridge. Lowell told us that 
 his parents were Millerites, that is, believed in the 
 second coming of Christ and the approaching end 
 of the world. The mother was a devout believer, 
 the father holding the same faith, or, for the sake of 
 domestic peace, pretending to hold it. Late one 
 night, when there was a very heavy fall of snow on 
 the ground, the old woman was awakened by a noise 
 from downstairs, which she at once supposed meant 
 the end of the world, and she accordingly woke her 
 husband up, saying: "John, the Lord's a-comin'; 
 I hear His chariot wheels." He replied: "You 
 old fool, to think the Lord would come on wheels, 
 when there's such good sleddin'." He told these 
 stories with an excellent imitation of the Yankee 
 speech. 
 
 I went with him one day to see the American Ad 
 miral Howell, on his flagship at Gravesend on the 
 Thames. We dined with the Admiral in his cabin, 
 when something was said which brought out the fol 
 lowing story from Lowell. There was a time, some 
 sixty years ago, when the fastest sailing-ships in the 
 world were built in the shipyards of New England. 
 About that time an American clipper and an English 
 yacht were entering the harbor of Genoa together, 
 and there was a race between the clipper and the 
 yacht; and the clipper won in the race. When the 
 two vessels were in port, the owner of the English 
 yacht, a person of polished manners, came on board 
 the American, and very handsomely congratulated 
 the captain of the clipper upon his achievement, 
 which he said was all the more remarkable in view 
 of the fact that it was the first time that his yacht 
 had ever been beaten. The old Yankee captain re-
 
 152 A Virginian Village 
 
 plied, "Well now, that's curious. It's the first time 
 the Polly Ann ever beat anything." 
 
 But if Mr. Lowell was not distinctively a Yankee, 
 the fact must not be overlooked that he was a very 
 natural and characteristic outcome of the peculiar 
 life of eastern Massachusetts. The neighborhood 
 of Boston, during the first half of this century, had 
 far more intellectual activity than any other part 
 of the country. The Unitarian movement began 
 in the first years of the century, and kept expanding 
 until, about the time of Mr. Lowell's early manhood, 
 it culminated in the New England Transcenden 
 talism. Throughout these years the little com 
 munity of eastern Massachusetts was stirred by 
 discussions to which the rest of the country was a 
 stranger. One has only to talk with old people near 
 Boston to perceive how much the neighborhood was 
 absorbed in these discussions. Years ago, for in 
 stance, I remember being at Bar Harbor, Maine, 
 in the company of two New England clergymen, 
 who spoke of some event as having happened "be 
 fore the war." Supposing that they referred to the 
 Civil War, I asked: "Did not that happen in the 
 early part of the century?" They replied: "We 
 are speaking of the religious war." Lowell's father 
 was a Unitarian clergyman, and the son's childhood 
 and youth were passed among men who had taken 
 part in those battles. These discussions, of course, 
 awakened his intellect, but they also gave his mind 
 a strong impulse in a spiritual and ideal direction. 
 His strong Puritan characteristics he no doubt owed 
 to these early surroundings. It is to be questioned 
 whether there have ever existed people more dis 
 tinctively Puritan than these New England Uni-
 
 Impressions of Lowell 153 
 
 tarians. Under the old Calvinistic belief, there was 
 a place for sin; sin had under that system a recog 
 nized position and in a sense a kind of respectability. 
 But in the polite and refined religion of the new 
 sect there appeared to be no place for sin and the 
 sinner. There was in the remote glance with which 
 that sect looked out upon evil from its library win 
 dows a Puritanism as extreme as that to be found in 
 the more violent reprobation of its orthodox prede 
 cessors. Along with this latent austerity, however, 
 there was, of course, a very real gentleness. There 
 was also a sincere and sanguine faith in the high 
 capabilities of human nature. A high conception 
 of human nature was indeed a general characteristic 
 of the Massachusetts society of the time. It showed 
 itself not only in their religions, but in their literary 
 and practical movements, such as Transcendentalism 
 and Abolitionism. Lowell came to early manhood 
 just at the time when the little world about Boston 
 was most agog with these ideas, and they were of a 
 kind to influence profoundly a high-minded young 
 man. They were ideas, one might add, particularly 
 suitable to youth. It was a propitious time for the 
 young, more so, one would think, than the practical 
 period of the war, or than the cooler and more critical 
 days that have since succeeded. These new ideas 
 must have been very alluring to the more clever and 
 generous among the young people of that day. Vir 
 tue was itself, one would think, unusually attractive 
 then. It was a time when the primroses grew along 
 the straight and narrow path, and the Wicket Gate 
 was as pretty and as rustic as in the old pictures in 
 "Pilgrim's Progress." Lowell had, to a marked de 
 gree, the characteristics of the society in which he
 
 154 A Virginian Village 
 
 was brought up, particularly its spirituality and 
 delicate moral sense. This, no doubt, goes with 
 out saying, and the statement of it may be some 
 what superfluous. But it was a most important 
 personal trait of his, one closely connected, by the 
 way, with that elasticity and youthfulness in which 
 he was so singularly gifted. In this connection, an 
 incident comes into my mind, which may indeed 
 seem scarcely worth mentioning, but which gave me 
 at the moment a strong sense of his instinctive love 
 of the nice and the superior, and of the character of 
 the society in which his early associations had been 
 cast. I was dining one night at his house, and sat 
 next the late Prof. Gray, a person of most attractive 
 appearance. Mr. Lowell came with me to the door, 
 and, with reference to Prof. Gray, said: "He always 
 seems to me like someone who has lived all his life 
 among flowers." At the time of Prof. Gray's death 
 I may add, I saw in the papers some beautiful lines 
 which Lowell had written about him, and which I 
 quote from memory: 
 
 Just Heaven preserve his life, well spent, 
 
 Whose indefatigable hours 
 Have been as gaily innocent 
 
 And fragrant as his flowers. 
 
 Something must be said of Mr. Lowell's residence 
 in England. It was his good fortune to do more, 
 perhaps, than any other individual has done to make 
 the two great branches of the English-speaking 
 world conscious of their essential unity. His ap 
 pointment as Minister to England was an accident, 
 due to the sudden and much regretted retirement 
 of Mr. Welsh, but the appointment proved to be a
 
 Impressions of Lowell 155 
 
 very fortunate one. An English critic has observed 
 that it was remarkable that Mr. Lowell should have 
 been so successful in English society, coming to 
 England, as he did, late in life. But in truth he 
 seems to me to have come just at the right time. In 
 some reflections of his upon travel, Mr. Lowell says 
 "that a man should have travelled around himself 
 and the great terra incognita just outside of and in 
 side his own threshold before he undertakes voyages 
 of discovery to other worlds." He had fulfilled these 
 conditions before he visited England. I doubt if there 
 was any time in his life when he was better fitted for 
 the social enjoyments and advantages of London than 
 at the time he came. He had ripe experience and an 
 abundance of various and entertaining knowledge, 
 and united with these qualities the attractive youth- 
 fulness of which mention has been made. And in 
 leaving home, he could not have gone to a better 
 place than England. He was fitted to find enjoy 
 ment anywhere, but England was a country of which 
 he was especially fond. He liked the climate. He 
 used to say that the English atmosphere was a "fat" 
 air, and that it supported him. I dare say he liked 
 and was soothed by the English landscape, not so 
 wild as his own, but so soft and vague and so suitable 
 to the good food and lodging to be had in English 
 country houses. His buoyant and sprightly dis 
 position, no doubt, took pleasure in the gay aspects 
 of London in the season, when Bond Street, surely 
 near Lubin's shop the best smelling street in the 
 world, has received a flood of the tepid and ephemeral 
 sunshine of those islands, and the shops and pave 
 ments are filled with the best specimens, male and 
 female, of a particularly handsome race.
 
 156 A Virginian Village 
 
 It was somewhat odd that he should have taken 
 with such zest to London society, considering the 
 solitary life he had led at Cambridge. Perhaps I 
 ought not to speak of it as solitary; a life passed 
 with a few chosen friends gives perhaps the greatest 
 social enjoyment that it is possible to have. But as 
 a matter of fact, till the time of his appointment to 
 Spain, he seems to have gone very little in general 
 society. He is said to have passed the greater part 
 of his life in the company of some half a dozen peo 
 ple. There was a populous city a few miles distant 
 from Cambridge, with plenty of good society, which 
 would have been glad to welcome him. But I be 
 lieve he did not go in that society at all. Nor do I 
 think he would have found the conditions of the so 
 ciety of any other American city any more to his 
 liking. And yet he no sooner goes abroad than he 
 is discovered to possess very great talents for general 
 society. These talents, I should add, were an im 
 portant part of his nature. In truth Lowell was a 
 man born to success, born to shine. Had it not been 
 for his London residence, one of his most striking 
 qualities, except as it appears in his writings, would 
 scarcely have been known, or at any rate would not 
 have obtained general recognition: I mean a brilliant, 
 scintillating quality. He had a power of shining, like 
 some bird, the sheen of whose bright plumage sends 
 back the rays of the sun. It was, however, in general 
 society and especially in literary society, I should say, 
 that his success lay rather than in smart and fash 
 ionable company. 
 
 Mr. Lowell, of course, enjoyed and highly appre 
 ciated the great consideration in which he was held 
 in London. Some people indeed had an impression
 
 Impressions of Lowell 157 
 
 that he was a little spoiled by it, which was certainly 
 not true. Considering his buoyant and elastic 
 temper, it was rather remarkable that he was not 
 more affected than he was by his great success. But 
 he had a native modesty, a just sense of the propor 
 tion of things, and an amiability of disposition which 
 always stayed by him. He did not seem to be in 
 the least uplifted by the official honors which came 
 on him late in life, and which would scarcely have 
 come to him in any country but the United States. 
 I remember one remark of his which showed his 
 feeling on this point. I came into the office one day 
 just after having seen the Lord Mayor's show pass 
 through Parliament Street. Mention was made of 
 the anecdote told in Hazlitt's "Conversations with 
 Northcote" about Alderman Boydell, who rose to 
 be an Alderman from a very humble station. North- 
 cote once asked him whether he was not gratified 
 by his fine coach and gilt trappings. Boydell said: 
 "Ah, there was one who would have been pleased 
 at it, but her I have lost." 
 
 "That is perfectly true," said Mr. Lowell. "The 
 people for whose opinion you care most are no longer 
 living; when I was appointed Minister to Spain, I 
 remember thinking: if my father were only alive to 
 see this, I should be pleased by it." This was his 
 feeling about official honors. Nor do I think he set 
 a very high estimate upon his writings and literary 
 abilities. He once told me that he said to a young 
 Englishman who had been introduced to him at Ma 
 drid, and who had said that he had never read his 
 works: "Well, I do not regard them as necessary to 
 a liberal education." I may be allowed here to re 
 mark that poets and artists will, in point of modesty,
 
 158 A Virginian Village 
 
 compare very favorably with any other class of men. 
 A very superior man in almost any walk of life is 
 not likely to be conceited; but I believe it is true that 
 poets and men of genius are, as a rule, less conceited 
 than men of talent, than men who can do something. 
 At any rate, men of talent, where they are conceited, 
 have a steadier and more ingrained pride. There 
 are several reasons for this distinction. In the first 
 place, the poets see over a wider field. Then the 
 man of talent can prove his ability, while the artist 
 cannot prove his. The man who has successfully 
 managed a railroad or conducted a newspaper may 
 point to his achievement as evidence of his ability. 
 But no artist can prove that his poem or his picture 
 is a good one; and it is in the power of almost anybody 
 to make him, for the moment, at any rate, think that 
 his work is nonsense. But conceit is in all men largely 
 a matter of native bent; and Mr. Lowell, anxious as 
 he was to be liked, and ready as he was to be admired, 
 did not have much of it in his character. 
 
 The literary and public expressions of an author 
 whom one knows are, in one's own mind, mixed up 
 with, and are scarcely distinguishable from, his more 
 personal and individual expressions; and I may 
 therefore be permitted, in conclusion, some reflec 
 tions upon Mr. Lowell's published works. Of the 
 poems not in dialect, there are two or three relating 
 to the events of his early life, which are in everyone's 
 mouth. In these feeling and passion express them 
 selves in true music; one can hear a voice, with the 
 sweet and rich timbre of early manhood, really sing 
 ing among the lilacs and apple-blossoms of the New 
 England June. The poems recited on various oc 
 casions after the war have been greatly admired,
 
 Impressions of Lowell 159 
 
 and yet they do not seem so natural as those earlier 
 ones. I have seen them described as "rhetorical," 
 which they no doubt are in a sense, having been 
 written to be delivered written, as it were, by ear, 
 as a lecture is prepared. There is still another class 
 of poems, not in dialect, in which Lowell was particu 
 larly successful. I mean those in which the serious 
 and the comic are brought together, and which glance 
 in these two directions. I remember his once coming 
 into the office and reading us a poem, in which the 
 moon was described as rising over a Cambridge 
 boarding-house. That was very like him the moon 
 and a Cambridge boarding-house! I do not find 
 the poem in his latest volume of verse, but it was 
 pretty enough to have been preserved. This was 
 a vein which was very natural to him, and in which 
 he was highly successful. 
 
 In all of these poems, as well as in those in dialect, 
 there is, to my mind, a cheery vigor, which I can 
 best describe by likening it to the bright aspect of 
 the New England landscape in midwinter. He liked 
 winter, by the way, as people of a strong constitution 
 are apt to do, and he has written "A Good Word 
 for Winter." One might say that the gaiety of 
 disposition which he had so strongly was of the 
 Northern rather than of the Southern kind. The 
 sun shines in a sky without a cloud, over a wide 
 domain of dazzling white, and the brilliant atmos 
 phere is filled with the flying snow-dust. He once 
 told me that he was of Scandinavian ancestry, and 
 I can imagine that there was something of this in his 
 verse and in his nature. I can fancy, as I read his 
 poetry or remember his conversation, a skald of the 
 Norsemen, with blond beard and ruddy cheek and
 
 160 A Virginian Village 
 
 merry bright eyes, singing in a snow trench and 
 quaffing deep draughts of the legendary mead. 
 I remember thinking this when one day at the office, 
 in the midst of some official stationery, sealing wax, 
 etc., we had a chop and a bottle of Bass, of which 
 drink he was very fond, but which was not good for 
 his gout. Do you know how the sap runs from the 
 side of the sugar-maple? That was very like the 
 clear current of his verse. He combined brightness 
 with elastic strength. His mind appeared to me to 
 have a tough elasticity, like the supple fibre of a 
 hickory sapling or the rebound of ivory. 
 
 But his greatest work was the dialect poetry, and 
 by that he will be best remembered. I have, indeed, 
 heard it questioned whether poetry which concerns 
 events already forgotten, and the explanation of 
 which posterity will have to look up in histories and 
 cyclopaedias, can be sure of being read in the future. 
 The poetry of Dryden is an example of poetry of 
 this kind which must always hold its place, but 
 undoubtedly, as a rule, such verse has small chance 
 of living. Mr. Lowell's poetry has also the disad 
 vantage of being in a dialect a dialect, moreover, 
 the memory of which, owing to the powerful unifying 
 influences at work in our society, must soon disappear 
 from among men. But "The Biglow Papers" have 
 on their side some weighty considerations. They 
 have immense animal spirits; I doubt if you will 
 anywhere find verse of the kind, in writing which 
 the poet has had more fun; and animal spirits is 
 perhaps a quality to which posterity is partial, just 
 as it is notoriously averse to the recondite and the 
 abstruse. Moreover, these poems have the United 
 States behind them. The country cannot afford
 
 Impressions of Lowell 161 
 
 to neglect them. The verse which we have of this 
 character is at the best very scant and is in extent, 
 at any rate, most disproportionate to the greatness 
 of the subject. It is to be doubted if there is any 
 where to be found a piece of European, or, I dare 
 say, Asiatic territory, which has not been better 
 sung than our great empire. Furthermore, this 
 country will always take especial care of the litera 
 ture relating to the Civil War. Throughout the long 
 years of material prosperity, which to every appear 
 ance lie before us, that epoch will always have a 
 great interest for the people. How colorless are the 
 issues with which our politics were concerned during 
 the later years of his life compared with those is 
 sues of human passion with which we were occupied 
 during the Civil War, and how colorless are they 
 likely to remain unless, indeed, the issues are to 
 concern questions of private property, in which case 
 they will be anything but colorless. How political 
 we were in those days of the war, and what a 
 capacity the country showed for self-sacrifice and 
 for interest in ideas! We can now appreciate these 
 qualities in the retrospect, for we are beginning 
 to look back with a certain incredulity upon a time 
 when people were interested in something besides 
 making money. The period of the war had further 
 more its tragical distinctions. Never again, it is prob 
 able and it is to be hoped, will the public stage be filled 
 by events and by scenes so dramatic. Hence it is 
 that works which portray with genius that time and 
 subject will be sure of a great and permanent place in 
 our literature. On these grounds, therefore, conjointly 
 with its high intrinsic excellence, one may anticipate 
 for Mr. Lowell's dialect poetry a long career of fame.
 
 LONDON RECOLLECTIONS OF LOWELL 
 
 THE first time I saw Mr. Lowell, I dined with 
 him at Longfellow's house in Cambridge. I 
 had brought a letter to Longfellow from Mr. William 
 Cullen Bryant. I was somewhat surprised by Long 
 fellow's appearance. He was shorter than I had ex 
 pected and inclined to stoutness. But he was a 
 beautiful person, and one of the most attractive of 
 men. That was what everyone said of him. I re 
 member particularly his voice, which was very mu 
 sical. There was a certain very agreeable delibera 
 tion in his way of speaking. Then the poet and 
 scholar were so large a part of his nature, and he had 
 such a feeling for the romance of knowledge and of 
 literature. I remember the charming voice and 
 manner in which he told me that the Italian wine 
 which he gave me at dinner was, he believed, the 
 Massic of Horace. The benignity and courtesy 
 which were his characteristics bore, I fancy, some 
 relation to his beauty. The world looks kindly upon 
 a beautiful person and it is natural that such a person 
 should return the world's amiable regard. This 
 beauty and grace were no doubt qualities which had 
 always been Longfellow's. My old friend, George 
 Ripley, the founder and head of Brook Farm, told 
 me that he once saw Longfellow, then a young pro 
 fessor at Bowdoin, give some degrees to the members 
 of a class of young men at a Bowdoin commencement, 
 and how impressed he was with the grace and es 
 pecially with the good feeling which he showed.
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 163 
 
 As I came into the drawing room at Longfellow's 
 house when I went to dine with him, I saw a man 
 sitting at one end of the room, whom I recognized as 
 resembling the photographs of Lowell. He was a 
 thick-set man, rather under the middle height, with 
 a heavy red beard. I had never met or seen him be 
 fore. Of course I knew "The Biglow Papers" almost 
 by heart, as we all did in those days, and admired 
 the introduction to the Vision of Sir Launfal, and 
 some of his shorter poems. But I could not like his 
 prose things, especially his critical writings. They 
 seemed to be statements of trite and generally ac 
 cepted ideas, expressed with an air of novelty and 
 with much affectation. Until you got to know him 
 there was something of this self-consciousness and 
 affectation in his appearance and manner. I never 
 afterwards saw him so affected as I thought he was 
 at this dinner. That may have been because I was 
 expecting something of the kind. I remember he 
 said to one of the Miss Longfellows: "You should 
 read Virgil; he's the sweet fellow," in what seemed 
 to me a pedantic and affected manner, although, of 
 course, the advice and the sentiment were unexcep 
 tionable. 
 
 After dinner I went with Longfellow and Lowell 
 into a smoking room. Longfellow was most agree 
 able and entertaining. I remember his telling this 
 story. His brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, was a 
 spiritualist; he was rich and I presume did a good 
 deal for mediums and such persons, and was as a 
 consequence highly regarded by them. Appleton 
 had asked Longfellow to go to see a medium of whom 
 he thought highly. Longfellow did go to see him, 
 and was invited to put some question to the man,
 
 164 A Virginian Village 
 
 which would test his ability as a medium. Long 
 fellow asked him who was the author of a treatise, 
 written during the Middle Ages, upon the capacity 
 of spirits to move material objects, such as chairs 
 and tables. It seems that such a treatise was written 
 by Thomas Aquinas. As the medium was not very 
 ready with his answer, Longfellow in the goodness 
 of his heart tried to help him by pronouncing slowly 
 the letters T-h-o-m-a-s A- "Tom Appleton!" said 
 the man eagerly. Lowell had with him the poem 
 which he was to read the next day at the Lexington 
 Centennial and which he had brought to read to 
 Longfellow. He gave no intimation that he wished 
 me to hear it; so I joined the ladies. In a little 
 while Longfellow came in and said that Lowell had 
 gone home, and that he had written a beautiful 
 poem. 
 
 There can be no doubt of the sincerity of the 
 friendly feeling towards one another of the distin 
 guished writers who at that time lived in and around 
 Boston. Dr. Johnson said that there is nothing 
 in the world more ridiculous than the reciprocal 
 civility of authors. He thought it very hollow. But 
 it was sincere enough among those Boston writers. 
 Perhaps they were too good to be jealous. I doubt 
 if there ever existed anywhere, since the first literary 
 fellow scratched his hieroglyphics on stone, a com 
 pany of such good and respectable literary men as 
 they were. It was easy to see that there was a 
 warm personal regard between Lowell and Longfel 
 low. I may here jot down that at the time of Long 
 fellow's death I remember Lowell coming one morn 
 ing into the Legation and saying as he stood before 
 the fire "I miss him in Cambridge," meaning when
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 165 
 
 he was thinking about Cambridge, knowing that 
 Longfellow was not there. 
 
 I fancy the somewhat affected manner which I 
 observed in Lowell on first meeting him was to some 
 extent his Cambridge manner, or rather his manner 
 to strangers, especially to the young literary small 
 fry who came there as visitors. He was, I suppose, 
 a good deal of a little god at Cambridge. He knew 
 but few people, and they were intimate friends or 
 devoted admirers. He spent a great many of his 
 evenings with these friends, meeting them several 
 times a week for whist. 
 
 The next time I saw Lowell was in Cincinnati 
 at the Republican Convention which met there in 
 1876. He was a delegate to the Convention from 
 Massachusetts, and I was one of a half a dozen New 
 York men who were mugwumps, or what a few years 
 later would have been called mugwumps, who had 
 come to Cincinnati, hoping to be of some assistance 
 in the nomination of the reform candidate, Mr. 
 Bristow. Mr. Lowell was in sympathy with us and 
 came to our rooms. He had always been the friend 
 of truth and of honest and just causes, and he was 
 with us in our opposition to carpet bag government 
 in the South and in our hope for the reform of the 
 civil service. He had not the least bit of his Cam 
 bridge manner then, and showed himself to be just 
 what he was, a friendly and kind-hearted man, who 
 especially wished to be liked. 
 
 When Mr. Hayes became President, Lowell was 
 appointed Minister to Spain. At about the same 
 time I was sent back as a secretary to London. I 
 saw more or less of him in London, when he was 
 on his way to Madrid. In 1879 he was transferred
 
 1 66 A Virginian Village 
 
 from Madrid to London. I was under him for four 
 or five years from that time. I would see him daily 
 for several hours at the Legation, and was a great 
 deal at his house. The Legation consisted of the 
 Minister and the two secretaries, Mr. W. J. Hoppin, 
 the first secretary, and myself. Some years later 
 Commander (now Admiral) Chadwick was sent out 
 as naval attache. Mrs. Lowell's health was not such 
 as to permit her to go into company, and about once 
 a week Hoppin and myself dined with Mr. and Mrs. 
 Lowell. I think Lowell's idea in having us was that 
 it helped to entertain his wife. He had, however, the 
 virtue of hospitality in a high degree. Mrs. Lowell 
 was extremely nice, a sensible, sincere, kind- 
 hearted woman, of a dignified and fine appearance. 
 Mr. Hoppin was a cultivated and very agreeable 
 man, about as good a type of American gentleman 
 as it would be possible to find. He was rather too 
 old a man to be a secretary, being a good deal older 
 than Lowell. He once told me that he had passed 
 some days as a guest of Miss Maria Edgeworth at 
 her house in Ireland, which is going a good way back. 
 He was also perhaps a man of too much position to 
 hold such a place. I was thirty years or more his 
 junior, but when I wanted a nice young fellow to dine 
 and go to the play with, I knew no one I preferred to 
 Hoppin. He was a man of excellent sense and much 
 humor, and very simple and straightforward. He 
 was a New Englander by birth, but had been nearly 
 all his life a New York lawyer. He had been one of 
 our early critics of art, a friend no doubt of the Hud 
 son River School of Painters, had written a volume 
 of poems which I have never seen, but have always 
 meant to look up for old acquaintance* sake, was
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 167 
 
 one of the founders of the Century Club, had been 
 President of the Union League Club and, without 
 taking the least trouble about it, had always been a 
 figure in New York society. At this time he was in 
 poor health and at our weekly dinners at Lowell's 
 a particular kind of dinner had to be cooked for him. 
 At these dinners Lowell did most of the talking and 
 was extremely entertaining and charming. 
 
 With Mrs. Lowell's improved health Lowell's 
 spirits became brighter. In Spain he had been very 
 unhappy, owing to his wife's illness. How much he 
 must have suffered at that time I gathered from a 
 remark he once let fall. On Dispatch days, when 
 there was often a good deal of work to be done, he 
 and I would be together for three or four hours and 
 would lunch together. At such times he would be 
 come very communicative. In speaking of his life 
 in Madrid, he said there were many times when his 
 feeling was that it would be very pleasant to be 
 lying upon his back in some churchyard looking up 
 through eight feet of clean gravel. 
 
 After his wife's recovery, the Lowells gave dinner 
 parties, mostly to their English friends. He would, 
 however, often have two or three Americans, who 
 were going through London, and these were the 
 evenings at his house which I most enjoyed, for if 
 you live in a foreign country, you want the society 
 of your own people, when you can get it. I was so 
 much younger than the other members of the Lega 
 tion that, although a bachelor well on in the thirties, 
 I think I must have represented youth to these older 
 men. This incident, which I recall, will give an idea 
 of the way they regarded me. A young lady from 
 Boston had dined at Lowell's house, whom I had
 
 1 68 A Virginian Village 
 
 taken down to dinner. Hoppin and I were in the 
 hall with our overcoats on, with Lowell, waiting to 
 go. A hansom had been called for the young lady. 
 Lowell said, "Hoppin, who is going home with this 
 girl?" Hoppin did not seem very keen about it. 
 Lowell turned to me and said, "As for you, you 
 rascal, you sha'n't go with her." I believe the young 
 lady went home alone. 
 
 Mr. Lowell was a very indulgent chief. I re 
 member being late at some of his dinners once I 
 think I had the meanness to lay it on the hansom 
 and got nothing worse than "Well, we're glad to see 
 you any way," which is considerably milder treatment 
 than I get now from my own relations for the same 
 offense. Indeed I scarcely ever knew him to make a 
 complaint of any kind of either of his secretaries. 
 Yes, I do recall this incident. He came into the 
 Legation one morning and told us that the day before 
 the then Prince of Wales (Edward VII) had said 
 to him, "You give your secretaries a wigging." 
 It seems that we had failed to tell him something 
 which he could not have been expected to know, and 
 which we should have told him. "So, "said Lowell, 
 "you are in receipt of a wigging." 
 
 Mr. Lowell had to the full that dependence upon 
 the good opinion and the friendly sentiments of 
 others, which is characteristic of artists. I think this 
 was one of his attractions. I remember once talking 
 with Mr. Roden Noel, a poet and a very agreeable 
 man, about him. We were comparing him with a 
 certain universally admired English literary man. 
 Mr. Noel thought Lowell was much more attractive, 
 "winning," was the word he used, a quality which 
 was in part the result of his wish to be liked. Lowell's
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 169 
 
 friendships were chiefly with English literary men, 
 between whom and himself there was that freema 
 sonry which exists everywhere among scholars. I 
 hardly think he had the same success in fashionable 
 company. Lowell was a man of genius, and men of 
 genius are rarely successful in that kind of society. 
 They have not the power of suiting their behavior 
 and their conversation to other people, which is a 
 condition of success in that world. I don't think 
 I ever knew one of them who seemed to have a real 
 gift for that kind of life. Napoleon, when in Egypt 
 just before a great battle, noticed that the Egyptian 
 cannon were mounted upon wooden stands and could 
 shoot only in the direction in which they were 
 pointed, so that all that Napoleon, whose guns were 
 on wheels and could be pointed in any direction, 
 had to do was to move his troops to one side and out 
 of the range of Egyptian guns. Men of genius are 
 like these Egyptians. Their expressions have much 
 more relation to their own conditions than to the 
 conditions and locality of those at whom these ex 
 pressions are directed. They shoot away, apparently 
 quite careless whether they hit anything or not. 
 It is different with practical men; lawyers wish to 
 win verdicts and business men want to make money, 
 and the pursuit of these external objects is in their 
 natures. Besides geniuses are too egotistical for 
 general society, too keenly sensitive to the opinions 
 of others. 
 
 Lowell, however, greatly enjoyed the position in 
 London which his diplomatic appointment gave him. 
 It was of great use to him. He was really shy and 
 easily abashed, as it is the nature of poets and artists 
 to be. He told me one morning that he had spoken
 
 170 A Virginian Village 
 
 the night before at the Savage Club, a club of literary 
 men, adding: "They are critics, you know, and I 
 was afraid of them, but I didn't let 'em see it." His 
 official position helped to give him audacity. With 
 the help of it, I have known him now and then to 
 do just a little bit of bluffing. He would, in a whimsi 
 cal manner, especially if he was feeling pretty well, 
 express himself freely and confidently upon subjects 
 of which he could not have known very much. An 
 English acquaintance of mine told me that he had 
 him one night to dinner and that he had at the same 
 time the celebrated authority upon classical antiqui 
 ties, Sir Charles Newton. There was a difference 
 of opinion between the two upon some point con 
 nected with this subject, upon which Sir Charles 
 Newton was one of the greatest living experts. A 
 discussion followed in which Lowell, who I dare say 
 was feeling pretty well and in high spirits, went in 
 and wiped the floor with Sir Charles Newton. I 
 said to my friend that I did not suppose that Sir 
 Charles Newton minded, that such an expert as he 
 must of course have regarded Lowell's talk as that 
 of an amateur. "Not a bit of it," said he, "I assure 
 you poor old Newton was dreadfully disturbed." 
 The other people present, knowing nothing about 
 the subject, probably gave the victory to the smart 
 est talker. When Lowell was in good spirits and in 
 sympathetic company, he was an admirable talker. 
 Gladstone told an American of my acquaintance 
 that he considered him the best talker in London. 
 "With one exception?" inquired my friend. But 
 Gladstone said he thought Lowell was better than he 
 was. When Lowell spoke upon subjects of which he 
 had real knowledge, he was apt to speak modestly
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 171 
 
 and with hesitation. I remember once asking him 
 something about Dante, of which subject he knew a 
 great deal, and he spoke with the caution with which 
 a man usually speaks upon a subject of which he is 
 master. 
 
 Many examples of his talk come to my mind, 
 from which it is not easy to make a selection. These 
 occur to me at random. I remember once asking him 
 if he did not think the parts of Lucretius about 
 falling particles queer material to make poetry out 
 of. He began talking about Lucretius and made some 
 striking remarks about the opening invocation to 
 Love, which he thought one of the finest passages 
 in literature. Again I remember his saying, and I 
 thought his remark was meant for me, that one 
 important condition of success in literature was the 
 wish to succeed. "If a man really wants to do any 
 thing," he said, "there may be some chance. But 
 if you don't care, you won't do anything." I recall 
 this also. One evening he and I dined with Hoppin 
 at Hoppin's house. Mr. Henry James was with us. 
 I had been reading Hazlitt's Liber Amoris, the ac 
 count which he wrote of his love affair with the 
 grand-daughter of his landlady. Mrs. Procter, who 
 was a friend of Hazlitt's, had told me that her hus 
 band, Barry Cornwall, the poet, had thought that 
 Hazlitt was so much in love with the girl that he had 
 better marry her, and had gone to see her to do what 
 he could to help the matter along. But he found that 
 she had been so frightened by Hazlitt's violence 
 that she would have nothing more to do with him. 
 I said that it was distressing to see a man of Haz 
 litt's talents make such an abject exposition of him 
 self. But Lowell thought differently. He said, and
 
 172 A Virginian Village 
 
 he spoke seriously and impressively: "There is no 
 telling what any one of us," meaning the four men 
 at the table, "may yet become through a woman." 
 He had spent his life as a teacher and had some of 
 the characteristics of men who have followed that 
 profession. He had not in the least that way of 
 talking down to people, which teachers sometimes 
 have, that sweetly reasonable, indulgent manner, 
 "Ah, do you think so," etc. Artists and poets are 
 never prigs, and Lowell was not. But he had to some 
 degree that vanity of omniscience, which is said to be 
 a quality of teachers. He really did know a great 
 deal, and knew about a great many things. He did 
 not like to be told anything, and he was glad to have 
 a chance to exhibit his knowledge. I remember once, 
 when we were at some evening party, that he came 
 to me in high dudgeon and told me that a few minutes 
 before he had encountered a certain notorious old 
 bore, whom nobody else would have minded, and 
 that this person had told him that kickshaws came 
 from quelquechose. Lowell was very indignant. He 
 was charming when he was in this mood. I re 
 member also an incident when his pride of knowledge 
 betrayed him into an unfortunate remark. Who 
 of us, however, does not now and then make such 
 mistakes and worse? I introduced the late chevalier 
 Wikoff to him. There can be few now who remember 
 anything about Wikoff. He was queer looking 
 enough; cross-eyed, clean-shaven, except for the 
 little side whiskers dyed black, of the pattern of two 
 generations before, and he wore an uncompromising 
 black wig, with the dress of a revived dandy of about 
 1820, a frock coat with a high collar, a stock and a 
 silk hat with a broad brim, very much rolled. He had
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 173 
 
 a very deep voice. In theory he was an utter cynic, 
 firmly persuaded that every man and woman had 
 his or her price; but he was a good old fellow, with an 
 excellent heart and a practice entirely at variance 
 with his philosophy. He had been made a chevalier 
 by some Italian potentate, I believe, and he liked 
 to be called by that title. I was very careful, how 
 ever, to introduce him as "Mr. Wikoff." It would 
 not have pleased Lowell if I had introduced him 
 with the title. Lowell said, "Ah, Mr. Wikoff, I 
 remember you in prison." Wikoff had once been 
 in the galleys in Italy. Now it was not at all a case 
 of Paul and Silas in chains, or of Galileo in the dun 
 geons of the Inquisition. He really had done some 
 thing, just what I don't know. My impression is 
 that he was charged with having kidnapped a lady. 
 Wikoff was surprised, but he was a very self-pos 
 sessed person, and, seeing at once that Lowell did 
 not mean to be unkind, said, "Yes, yes, so I was." 
 Lowell happened to know that Wikoff had been in 
 prison; indeed Wikoff had told all about it in an 
 autobiography and he liked to show that he knew 
 it. 
 
 I should not forget to mention one of his peculiari 
 ties. No one could have been much with Lowell 
 without hearing a great deal of talk about Jews, on 
 which subject he was an expert. He thought them 
 so important; he thought the Jew blood in a man who 
 has it dominates all other strains of blood in the man. 
 He saw Jews everywhere. He thought that Glad 
 stone was a Jew. I believe indeed that he was of 
 Jewish descent; his brother, Sir Thomas Gladstone, 
 was extremely Jewish looking. Lowell's discovery 
 of a Jewish descent in people, however, was not so
 
 174 A Virginian Village 
 
 much from an examination of their physiognomy as 
 from their names. Vernon Harcourt was a Jew be 
 cause he was from the Levison Gowers, Lord Gran- 
 ville's family, who, of course, were Jews because their 
 name was Levison. "There's where Harcourt gets 
 his impudence," he would say. One day I was walk 
 ing in the Park with him when a man I knew passed. 
 I said, "That's the new Russian secretary David- 
 off; he succeeds Bartholomai." Lowell said, 
 "Davidoff Bartholomai both Jews." He said 
 that he himself was a Jew because he was descended 
 from people named Russell Russell was his middle 
 name Russell being a Jewish name. He said that I 
 was a Jew because my name means Christmas, 
 though he admitted grudgingly "You haven't 
 got the nose for it." The province of Natal was so 
 named because it was discovered on Christmas day; 
 the "t" is softened into "d" in Spanish and the 
 Venetian dialect of Italian. Lowell insisted that 
 my earliest converted ancestor wanted to show how 
 good he was and took the most Christian name he 
 could find. When I reminded him that there was a 
 family of my name who had been from father to son 
 in the Gold Book of Venice since 1240 and who 
 claimed descent from one of the Magi, there was 
 further chaff. I should explain that Mr. Lowell had 
 no dislike of Jews but a great interest in them. 
 
 During Mr. Lowell's stay as Minister, our govern 
 ment bought the Franklin manuscripts, which were 
 in London. The State Department sent to the Le 
 gation the catalogue with the request that either 
 Mr. Hoppin or I should go to the British Musum, 
 where the manuscripts were stored, and examine 
 them, and compare them with the catalogue. I
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 175 
 
 accordingly spent three or four hours daily at the 
 Museum for nearly a month, examining the papers. 
 What I had to do was to see that the government 
 got what they had bought. It was most interesting 
 work, particularly the examination of the papers 
 relating to Franklin's residence in Paris. Franklin 
 was in daily intercourse with the great characters 
 of that great age of France and of the world. There 
 were letters from them dated "Tuesday," "Mon 
 day," "March 12," "June 14," etc. I found myself 
 keeping his engagement book for him. "No, he 
 can't dine with Vergennes on Thursday; he is en 
 gaged to Madame d'Houdetot for that day." I 
 noticed some of the papers were in the form of collars, 
 cuffs, sleeves, etc. On asking why this was, I was 
 told that they were in the possession of a descendant 
 of Franklin, who lived in London in lodgings in St. 
 James St., and died there. These lodgings were over 
 a tailor shop. The tailor took possession of the man 
 uscripts and threw them on top of a chest; when he 
 needed patterns he would have recourse to these 
 papers. 
 
 After I had made my report on the papers, a day 
 was fixed for their formal transfer to the U. S. Gov 
 ernment. Mr. Lowell thought the occasion suf 
 ficiently dignified to go to the Museum in his own 
 carriage, and I went with him. Out of his meagre 
 salary he could not have very much, but he could 
 have a nice pair of bays and a good brougham, with 
 which he made a rather smart appearance. I re 
 member that drive very well. He was in boyish 
 spirits, talked a great deal and was of course mighty 
 good company. I remember, as I followed him into 
 the room at the Museum in which the papers were
 
 1 76 A Virginian Village 
 
 kept, the somewhat grandiose expression of his back 
 and shoulders. All there was to do was to see two or 
 three people and to take over a few wooden boxes. 
 It was a symptom of that incorrigible youthfulness 
 and simplicity which were part of his character. 
 
 Since writing the above paragraph, I have been 
 shown the following postscript to a letter from Lowell 
 to R. W. Gilder, in which Lowell relates a supposi 
 titious anecdote of himself: 
 
 "As Lowell was passing along the Edgware Road 
 with a friend two years ago, their eyes were at 
 tracted by a sign with this inscription 'Hospital 
 for Incurable Children.' Turning to his companion 
 with that genial smile for which he is remarkable, 
 Lowell said quietly, 'There's where they'll send me 
 one of these days.'"' A bit of self-knowledge which 
 is perhaps unusual. 
 
 Lowell was quite the youngest man I ever knew. 
 This youthfulness seemed to be in part the result 
 of several qualities. One of these was goodness, for 
 good men keep their youth longer than men who are 
 not good. He had always led a good life. He was a 
 thoroughly honest man and a scrupulously honorable 
 one. He was, I may say in passing, a very kind man 
 and a man of great charity. He was one of the 
 least censorious and the least vindictive of men. It 
 was very rare to hear him speak ill of anybody. 
 This was not in the least from policy, for he had very 
 little of that quality; it was merely that he was by 
 nature kind and scrupulous. If he did criticise, it was 
 done in the gentlest manner. The only person of 
 whom I remember to have heard him speak with 
 any degree of asperity was the Rev. Henry Ward 
 Beecher, and his criticism of him was on the score
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 1 77 
 
 of refinement. He said that upon one occasion he 
 had been seated next Beecher at his (Beecher's) 
 particular request. I can understand that Lowell 
 might not have liked him. Beecher was a very power 
 ful person, quite overwhelming indeed, and might 
 easily have offended the amour propre of Lowell. 
 
 Not only did he not speak ill of people, but he 
 would be silent and would look rather uncomfortable, 
 when unkind things were said about people in his 
 presence. These are qualities you would not expect 
 to find in a satirical poet. But then satire was not 
 his gift. He had not the unkindness you would ex 
 pect to find in a satirical writer; nor had he the crit 
 ical acumen which goes with that endowment. He 
 was not in the least sharp. "The Biglow Papers" are 
 infinitely spirited and joyful productions, which are 
 part of the permanent literature of the country 
 and intimately associated with a great period of our 
 history, but you would hardly call them satire, 
 certainly not satire of the order of Juvenal and Swift. 
 They had not enough knowledge for that. I don't 
 know very well who "Gov. C.," "John P. Robinson " 
 and the other people attacked in those verses with 
 such vigor and vivacity may have been, but I sus 
 pect they were nearer right than the young poets 
 and orators who, with hearts stronger than their 
 heads, and not knowing what they were about, were 
 driving the country on to war. But that remark 
 applies as well to the whole Republican Party, of 
 which these poems were forerunners and in a sense 
 contributing causes; none of us knew what we were 
 about. 
 
 But not only was Lowell charitable in speech and 
 opinion; he was a man of much practical kindness as
 
 1 78 A Virginian Village 
 
 well, and was very ready to do anybody a good turn. 
 There is one kind of benevolence, which an American 
 diplomat abroad has many opportunities of exer 
 cising. He is often called upon to help his country 
 men who need financial assistance, and Lowell did 
 more of this than his limited means justified. 
 
 One cause of his youthfulness was no doubt phys 
 ical. He had rugged health and was a man of first 
 rate physique. He had that build which is said to 
 be one of the best for strength and endurance, deep 
 chest and broad shoulders, set on short, stout legs. 
 I think you see physical strength in his poetry, in 
 the introduction to " The Vision of Sir Launfal," for 
 instance. In a happy and hopeful period of time, 
 take a high-minded young poet in the early enthusi 
 asm of natural virtue and with something of the pride 
 of that quality and in first rate physical condition, 
 turn him loose among the lilacs, buttercups and bobo 
 links of the sudden, transient and brilliant Spring 
 of Massachusetts and let him sing, and you may have 
 poetry something like this. You see the same quality 
 in that most vital poem "The Courtin'," a pro 
 duction which has the true madness and gladness of 
 poetry and humor. It is perhaps the most like him of 
 anything he ever wrote. As I read I can see the 
 young poet before me, the sturdy figure and mobile 
 features alive and vibrant with poetic rage and 
 laughter. 
 
 And when he made O'e Hundred ring, 
 She knowed the Lord was nigher. 
 
 These two poems bid fair to live as long as our 
 language does. First rate health may also in part
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 179 
 
 explain the apparent affectation to be found in 
 some of his prose things. He is feeling his oats. 
 He prances about all ribbons and rosettes like a 
 stock horse at a county fair. During the period of my 
 service under him he was, although sixty to sixty-five 
 years of age, a man in perfect health. He would do 
 things you would scarcely expect of a man of that age. 
 He did not seem to mind cold, for instance. Indeed I 
 have heard that, when he wanted a bath, he has been 
 known to cut a hole in the ice of the Charles River 
 and jump in. I recall this incident. We had been at 
 one of the balls at Buckingham Palace. The dress 
 in which we had to attend these parties was an or 
 dinary dress coat and waistcoat with knee breeches 
 and silk stockings. On coming away from one of 
 these balls at two or three o'clock in the morning, 
 the carriage was not to be found and we walked home, 
 a distance of perhaps a mile, having nothing on from 
 the knee downward but silk stockings and very thin 
 pumps. I felt as if I were standing up to my knees 
 in cold water. Lowell, on the contrary, did not seem 
 to feel the cold in the least but stepped along in the 
 gayest of spirits. But within eight years from that 
 time he was gone. 
 
 The last years of Lowell's life, those which he 
 spent in this country after leaving London, seemed 
 to be sadder than they should have been. In the 
 lives of some men there is, towards the end, a season 
 like Indian Summer; at any rate so it is said in novels 
 and romances. I have indeed known men of whom 
 that was true. But it did not seem to come to 
 Lowell. I don't see why he should not have had it. 
 Until attacked by his last illness, he had been in 
 fairly good health. He was comfortably off, I sup-
 
 180 A Virginian Village 
 
 pose. He had some private fortune, and he had 
 other sources of income. He told me that his royal 
 ties brought him about twelve hundred dollars a year, 
 which was a good deal to get from half a dozen vol 
 umes of poems and miscellaneous essays. He said 
 that he could go back to his professorship whenever 
 he wished, and do as much work, or as little, as he 
 liked. His position before the country, moreover, 
 was a most enviable one. From the time of his re 
 turn from London till his death he was, with the 
 possible exception of Mr. Cleveland, perhaps the 
 most distinguished man of the country. But in spite 
 of these advantages his last years seemed desolate. 
 It is our misfortune here that we have no great 
 capital, where every American may feel at home, as 
 an Englishman does in London, or a Frenchman, or 
 indeed any human being does, in Paris. Of course 
 an American, who lives in his own country, must live 
 somewhere, and any place here is dull after London 
 or Paris. Lowell returned to London once or twice 
 after his connection with the Legation had ceased, 
 but he was not happy there. A gentleman with 
 whom he stayed after his return told me that he 
 seemed to feel the loss of his old position. When I 
 said that I should have thought that Lowell without 
 an official position would have been better placed 
 there than anybody else with one, my friend said: 
 "So should I, but that was not his feeling." Mr. 
 Phelps, who succeeded him, intimated the same 
 thing, when I spoke to him about Lowell, adding, 
 "I never make the mistake of going back." I don't 
 quite see why it should be a mistake to go back. It 
 is a matter of the man's own feeling. He may still 
 take a walk in Piccadilly and Bond Street, may
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 181 
 
 visit the tailors and haberdashers, and shop at Har- 
 rod's and the Army and Navy Stores. How nice 
 it smells in the Groceries Department at the Army 
 and Navy! He may still have a ride on the top of 
 an omnibus, one of the pleasantest of London diver 
 sions, and may look down on the crowds in those old 
 streets, as if from the deck of a ship. He may look 
 up his old friends, and, if he will leave a few cards, 
 will no doubt have plenty to do. But that would 
 not have been enough for Lowell. Is it not true 
 that people, whose lives have very nearly always 
 been happy and prosperous, do not seem to take the 
 disappointments which are sure to come with ad 
 vancing years with the courage and endurance 
 which men have who have been early inured to a 
 certain amount of adverse fortune? Lowell had led a 
 singularly happy life and he had been fairly prosper 
 ous all his days. I had another literary chief in Lon 
 don, an eminent and gifted man, Mr. John Lothrop 
 Motley. Mr. Motley was a man who had always lived 
 a prosperous life until his difference with his govern 
 ment in 1870, when the government asked for his 
 resignation. With his literary fame, the high re 
 gard in which he was held at home, and the place 
 which his personal attractions had won for him in 
 some of the most distinguished societies in Europe, 
 no man would have been in better position than he 
 to reply "Here it is," and, with a shrug of the shoul 
 ders, to retire, and to say and think no more about 
 it, and that is what almost any man who had had 
 much experience of the ups and downs and the give 
 and take of ordinary practical life would have done. 
 But it was his misfortne that he did not do that. 
 I have said that Lowell was the youngest man I
 
 1 82 A Virginian Village 
 
 ever knew. It is also true that I never knew any 
 other man who had a greater dread of getting old 
 than he. He would sometimes say to me I was 
 twenty-five years the younger "Oh, you'll begin 
 to feel it pretty soon." He wrote poems on the sub 
 ject. There was a wonderful old lady in London 
 whom we knew very well, Mrs. Procter. This inci 
 dent will give you a notion of what Mrs. Procter was 
 like. I met her in St. James's Park one morning 
 when she was about ninety, the short sturdy figure 
 toddling up a rather stiff hill in the park and going 
 at a good pace. I asked her where she was going. 
 She said, "I'm going to London." I said, 
 "Aren't you in London?" St. James's Park being 
 about the centre of London. "No," she said, "I 
 don't call this London. I call Bond Street London." 
 Lowell wrote her a poem beginning "I know a girl; 
 they say she's eighty." The poet says that when he 
 is in search of Youth he is acquainted with a certain 
 doctor "who keeps the drug" "doctor," of course 
 rhyming with "Procter." The last time I saw Mr. 
 Lowell he gave me a curious and somewhat pathetic 
 indication of his interest in this subject. I hap 
 pened to be for a day in Boston at some time during 
 the closing years of his life, and went out to see him 
 in the teeth of a terrible March blizzard. I thought 
 he seemed rather lonely. He told me that Hoppin 
 had been to see him not long before. He said that 
 he looked well and seemed to be in good health, but 
 he noticed that when he went away he was a little 
 awkward in getting down the front steps. When I 
 left, he came to the door with me and stood there, 
 evidently waiting to see how I negotiated the front 
 steps. At the age I was then there was no reason
 
 London Recollections of Lowell 183 
 
 why there should be anything the matter with my 
 action. But the incident was characteristic of 
 Lowell, and of his intense interest in the subject of 
 youth and age. 
 
 One of my London chiefs, Mr. John Welsh, Mr. 
 Lowell's immediate predecessor, a man to whom I 
 was greatly attached, once said to me: "You at your 
 age think it a good thing to be a minister or some 
 thing of that sort. There is not much in that. No 
 time in your life will probably be so pleasant as 
 where you are now." "You think not?" I asked. 
 "Probably not," he replied. I have had many 
 pleasant and interesting hours since. But upon the 
 whole, perhaps, this forecast of my old friend has 
 proved true. I had a pleasant time with him, and 
 it was pleasant under his successor. Lately in Lon 
 don on a hot Sunday afternoon in September, Lon 
 don very empty and the air having that deadness 
 which characterizes London hot weather, I turned 
 southward from Albert Gate and found myself in a 
 long parallelogram, with a narrow grass plot in the 
 middle, surrounded by an iron fence. I did not 
 know it at first. "What is this ? " I thought. " Why, 
 of course it is Lowndes Square, and over there is 
 Lowell's house." The house had the silence which 
 belongs to places we have known well in the past 
 but have ceased to know. The bright and manly 
 figure of the former occupant stood before me in a 
 peculiarly winning and kindly light a man to be 
 liked, admired, respected and regretted.
 
 A VIRGINIAN JOURNEY 
 
 I BEGAN a recent journey in Virginia by a visit 
 to some old friends in Fauquier County an 
 Englishman married to a Virginian wife. Their 
 life presented a delightful contrast to that I had been 
 leading in New York. It is a life passed with horses, 
 dogs, and cattle, and in which men have almost as 
 much leisure and as much time on their hands as 
 the animals have. I found my friend's house an 
 excellent place in which to get over the grippe. We 
 had the variable weather of the season, which was the 
 last of March. At times on very sunshiny days it 
 was warm enough to have the doors and windows 
 open, which, after the wintry scene I had just left 
 in New York, was a novelty. The next day would 
 bring a chill wind, which would close the windows. 
 But the dogs would all gather in the smoking-room 
 a place littered up with guns, books, tobacco-pipes, 
 and many odds and ends having to do with sport 
 and animals; and, with a great wood fire and the 
 feet on the fender, and plenty of books, chiefly about 
 horses in which animals' disease is nearly as attrac 
 tive as health is in human beings one rather pre 
 ferred the bad weather. 
 
 It was a kind of life in which the domestic affections 
 flourish exceedingly. There were some beautiful 
 children. One of these, a lame child, had a delightful 
 voice, the joyous accents of which, when he was play 
 ing in the garden, I could hear through the open 
 windows of my bedroom. Of course, a lame child
 
 A Virginian Journey 185 
 
 is sure to receive a great deal of affection, and being 
 loved was quite a matter of course to this one. One 
 morning when he was sitting on a stone in the garden, 
 occupied with his own thoughts, and his father and 
 I were walking back and forth past him, the father 
 said, as he passed "I detest you." The child in 
 terrupted the thread of his reflections sufficiently 
 to remark carelessly: "On the contrary, you adore 
 me." The youngest was about two years old. The 
 first morning of my stay in the house, I came down 
 late to breakfast, and my friends asked me how I had 
 slept. This piece of good manners impressed the 
 child, who was sitting in a high chair by his mother's 
 side, and he put it away in his mind for future use. 
 Accordingly the next morning when I again appeared 
 late at breakfast, before anyone else had a chance 
 to say anything, he called out to me from the other 
 end of the table "Dal, how you sleep?" 
 
 In Fauquier the horse, rather than man, is the 
 centre of society. A good deal of the raising of horses 
 here is done by Englishmen. They are good horse 
 men, but not always good men of business. At one 
 place, at which there were several very fine imported 
 stallions, three or four of these young men lived. 
 I was there once and found the lazy fellows not yet 
 out of bed; I looked through the window and saw a 
 billiard table. There was to be a steeplechase in the 
 neighborhood in a few days, which was expected 
 with great interest in the house in which I was stay 
 ing, because a horse belonging to the house (a very 
 handsome and promising animal) was to run in it. 
 One of our occupations was to go and watch the 
 practice for the steeplechase a rather chilly amuse 
 ment, I thought, at first. The skies were usually
 
 1 86 A Virginian Village 
 
 cloudy, although at times bright with a cold sun; 
 it was in that dull March weather when the sod has 
 scarcely felt the influence of the spring. The con 
 trast of this country scene was very sharp with the 
 urban, sedentary life I had just left, that of a com 
 mercial community largely suffering from the in 
 fluenza. These four-year-old thoroughbreds had not 
 the grippe-, youth was the proper possession of their 
 riders, whose cheeks the strong air had painted with 
 a ruddy color. It was not possible long to resist the 
 contagion of the spectacle. Soon the hot blood which 
 coursed in the veins of horses and riders began to 
 stir in your own. It was such an abrupt meeting 
 with that primal, natural life of which we have all 
 been cheated. My mind went backward to those 
 legendary scenes with which the imagination of man 
 kind has filled other climes and earlier and happier 
 ages. This was not the dull landscape of the Potomac 
 and the Rappahannock; these young men who leaped 
 the eager steeds over the hurdles were not the English 
 youths I had seen about the post-office and the 
 village stores; they were rather Centaurs, sons of 
 Chiron, playing in the vales of Thessaly. 
 
 My friend's horse, Ascot, was said to be one of the 
 best-looking in that part of the country; he was four 
 years old, a fraction over sixteen hands high, and 
 near perfection in form. The day came, and Ascot 
 looked very splendid; the groom had made his bay 
 coat fairly refulgent. Before the horses started his 
 master was offered $800 for him, but he thought he 
 could get 1,000 if he won the race, which it seemed 
 likely he would do. As Ascot, with his grand stride, 
 galloped over the course, he glittered like a horse 
 in armor. He was coming in well at the head of
 
 A Virginian Journey 187 
 
 the race, when he fell at the last stone fence. From 
 the stand we could see that he did not rise, and 
 feared the worst. Once indeed he rose on his fore 
 legs, his haunches still on the ground, as a dog sits; 
 an attitude regarded as a very bad indication. 
 Everybody hurried to the spot across the fields. 
 The horse was lying upon the grass, his burnished 
 coat fairly glistening in the sun, his legs trembling, 
 but his eye showing less suffering than I should have 
 expected, the men and ladies whispering about him 
 as if about a human death-bed. A veterinary said 
 his back was broken. Someone said, "He is eating 
 grass; isn't that a good sign?" A boy of eleven stand 
 ing by said, "That is nothing; I have seen them eat 
 grass when they were dying." Ascot's master was 
 walking about, gloomily and sadly, holding a re 
 volver. But the ladies pleaded that there was a 
 chance for Ascot and that he should have it. 
 
 Accordingly he was drawn home upon a wagon 
 and "hung," as it is called, i. e., stood upon his feet 
 and held up by belts passed under him and attached 
 to the roof of his stable. Here he stood for a week, 
 tended day and night, apparently in no great suffer 
 ing, indeed usually stupid with the narcotics which 
 were poured into him. He was the one theme of 
 thought and conversation. The household, parents 
 and children, white and colored, human and canine, 
 were the most of the time about him. The little 
 mulatto maid, who brought me my bath in the morn 
 ing, said: "Ascot is better!" or "Ascot is not so well 
 this morning!" But, of course, he did not get well. 
 
 Virginia has scarcely the reputation of Kentucky 
 for raising horses, but many good horses of several 
 kinds are raised in the State. In Fauquier and Lou-
 
 1 88 A Virginian Village 
 
 don Counties jumpers and hunters are bred; draught 
 horses are raised in the Valley; in the counties in the 
 southwest, such as Wythe, Pulaski, &c., they breed 
 saddle-horses, by which is usually meant gaited 
 horses, that is, pacers and rackers; trotters are 
 raised all over the State. Many of the Loudon and 
 Fauquier horses are bred to sell to men who belong 
 to the hunting clubs of the large Eastern cities. It 
 is only in this part of the State that hunters and 
 jumpers are to be found. In other parts of the 
 State, certainly in my own native country, ability 
 to jump is considered a vice, for the reason that 
 higher fences are required to keep jumping horses 
 in. Pacers, rackers, and single-footers are seen 
 everywhere throughout Virginia. Pacing is cer 
 tainly not a pretty gait, but it by no means deserves 
 the contempt in which it is held by the English and 
 by Americans whose fancy is based upon English 
 taste. Of course, trotting is a better gait for riding 
 in city parks, or for pleasure riding of any kind, be 
 cause it is better-looking and gives the rider more 
 exercise. But in Virginia a saddle-horse is very 
 necessary for getting about. Often the only way, 
 at any rate the best way, of going between distant 
 points is on horseback. The good old notion of the 
 horse as the natural means of locomotion still pre 
 vails there, and the traveller is still set forward upon 
 his journey by " evening red and morning grey." 
 For all day rides these gaited horses are very com 
 fortable. You must often carry saddle-bags, and it 
 is difficult to trot with saddle-bags. If you are 
 riding all day under a Virginia midsummer sun, you 
 will find it comfortable to carry an umbrella, and you 
 can scarcely trot with an umbrella. A most useful
 
 A Virginian Journey 189 
 
 gait for a long distance riding is a dog-trot, fox-trot, 
 or running walk. But this, again, is not a beautiful 
 movement. These gaited horses, by the way, even 
 in walking have a quick method of moving their 
 hind legs which is ugly. A peculiarity of Virginia 
 horses also seemed to me to be drooping hind 
 quarters. The head, neck, and withers, on the con 
 trary, are often exceedingly good. 
 
 In one very beautiful part of Virginia to which I 
 went from Fauquier, I had the use of an animal 
 that had these characteristics. He belonged to one 
 of the most distinguished of the Confederate cavalry 
 leaders the only commander, I have been told, 
 who ever captured a gunboat with cavalry. Since 
 the war the general had brought new lustre to a fa 
 mous name by a civil career almost as distinguished 
 as that he achieved in arms. He is a lover of horses, 
 having been first in his class at West Point in horse 
 manship, has an extensive knowledge of them, and 
 great skill in handling them. But he has now little 
 leisure for horses, being much engaged in the im 
 portant affairs related to the movement being made 
 for the development of the South. He therefore 
 kindly allowed me the use of this animal while I was 
 in his neighborhood. This horse, which was five 
 years old and had a particularly fine neck, long and 
 well arched, was eighteen hands high. I never, 
 when mounted, had been at such a distance from the 
 ground before. He was scarcely bridle-wise, but 
 had an excellent disposition, as big things are apt 
 to have. One discovery I thought I made with him, 
 namely, that these very big horses cannot shy 
 badly. 
 This incident I thought showed great intelligence
 
 190 A Virginian Village 
 
 on his part. One morning I was going along the 
 road when I saw approaching me a boy perhaps 14 
 years old, carrying an empty flour barrel, who, with 
 that ingenuity in making a nuisance of himself which 
 belongs to a boy of that age, had let down the flour 
 barrel over his head till it rested on his shoulders, so 
 that even to my eyes he looked like a monster with 
 the body of a boy and the head of a flour barrel. 
 The horse had, of course, never seen anything like 
 that before and, though a very sensible animal, did 
 not like v it, and he lifted his giraffe-like neck and 
 stared at it, prancing from one side of the road to 
 the other, j As the boy came nearer, he turned and 
 ran back' about fifty yards. I made no attempt to 
 control him, being curious to see what he would do. 
 He turned to look at the boy, apparently more curious 
 than afraid, and, liking the spectacle no better than 
 before, turned again and fled. This he repeated 
 several times, I giving him a loose rein. The boy, 
 who had not seen or heard us, was still advancing. I 
 presently called to him and asked him to set down 
 the barrel beside the road, which he did, and the 
 horse went by, giving it a wide berth. A few miles 
 further on I came to a flour mill, in front of which 
 there were a number of flour barrels. He had often 
 passed these barrels before and had never taken any 
 notice of them. But this time he stopped short and 
 looked at them intently. I laid the rein on his neck, 
 when he went up to one of them and studied it care 
 fully, going all over it with his nose. Then with a 
 toss of his head he went on, as if to say "That 
 which I took for the head of a boy was only a flour 
 barrel." 
 
 It was a serious matter to get off to open a gate on
 
 A Virginian Journey 191 
 
 account of the difficulty of mounting. Not only 
 had you to climb the eighteen hands, but you had 
 to get your legs over the high cantle of a military 
 saddle. Fortunately there was often at hand a 
 little darkey, who would open the gate for me. 
 There was one child about ten years old, very black 
 and nearly naked, who once did me this service. I 
 felt in my pocket for the usual nickel, with which 
 coin a young darkey must have great familiarity. 
 Not finding one, I gave him a dime. It was in the 
 days of the real estate boom in the South, and the 
 child had heard a great deal about the purchase and 
 sale of land. My munificence had at first the effect 
 of depriving him of speech, but when I had ridden 
 about fifty feet from him, he found his voice and 
 called after me "Say, boss, is yuh goin' tuh buy 
 out dis heah groun'?" He made sure I was a great 
 real estate operator. When there was no little 
 darkey about, my plight was serious. The horse 
 would not be led up to a stone or a fence. Once, 
 when I was about eight miles from home and was 
 trying to get him up to a fence, he became very much 
 excited and I feared he would break away from me, 
 which would have been unpleasant, as there was a 
 stream about two feet deep between me and my 
 destination, which I was relying upon his long legs 
 to get me across. There was one way, however, by 
 which it was possible to mount from the ground. 
 The stirrup leathers were very long. You could 
 let out the left stirrup till it was within two feet of 
 the ground, and then let out the right stirrup and 
 throw it across the saddle; a kind of ladder was thus 
 made on the left side, by means of which it was pos 
 sible to walk on his back.
 
 192 A Virginian Village 
 
 I breakfasted one morning with the general and his 
 family. He told me this story which he said he had re 
 lated to President Cleveland, whom it amused. A 
 lawyer and politician of his neighborhood had as a 
 client a farmer who would come to consult him not 
 only about matters of law but about other matters as 
 well. He came one day and said "What does this 
 new word 'mugwump' I see in the papers mean?" "A 
 mugwump," explained the politician, "is a Repub 
 lican who votes the Democratic ticket a man who 
 puts his ideas of right above party affiliations." "A 
 pretty good sort of man, isn't he?" said the farmer. 
 "Oh, a very superior man," was the reply. "Now," 
 said the farmer, "what would you call a Democrat 
 who voted the Republican ticket?" The politician, 
 much astonished by this suggestion, said with great 
 animation, "Why, sir, I should call him a damned 
 fool!" 
 
 The general was a man of much wit and liveliness 
 of mind. I have heard this about him. Someone 
 asked him why you so seldom see a dead cavalry 
 man. The general, who was one of the most dis 
 tinguished Confederate cavalry leaders, said "Well, 
 you see it's like this. We wait till we get within 
 about three hundred yards of the enemy. Then we 
 raise a great shout, and, if they don't run, we do." 
 At the same time I doubt if it would have been wise 
 to take the general at his word. 
 
 I may be permitted to say that I was much im 
 pressed with one person at the table the general's 
 mother. Virginians are much chaffed by the world- 
 at-large regarding the claims of their old families to 
 the possession of superior manners; but my observa 
 tion is that the good families of tidewater Virginia
 
 A Virginian Journey 193 
 
 are quite justified in thinking highly of themselves 
 on that score. This old lady was nearly blind and 
 scarcely spoke a word, and she was dressed in the 
 plainest way. But there seemed to me to be some 
 thing distinctly grande dame about her. 
 
 One is continually brought close to nature and 
 wild animal life in travelling in this country. In 
 one mountain town to which my travels on the gen 
 eral's big colt led me I met a dark, tall, and very 
 powerful-looking man, who was decidedly drunk; 
 there was some kind of festival in the village. He 
 took off his hat and made me a low bow, and on top 
 of his head, nestling in a great shock of black hair, 
 was a baby opossum, which he said he had found 
 and was taking home as a present to his little girls. 
 The marsupials are, I believe, a mammalian order 
 much more ancient than other existing mammals. 
 I have been told that the female marsupial has in the 
 breast a compressor muscle by means of which milk is 
 ejected into the mouth of the young. The little 
 marsupial may not know enough "to come in when 
 it rains," but he does know enough to open its mouth. 
 But I have never seen a creature more wide-awake 
 or up to the times than this one. He appeared to 
 have grown quite used to his queer habitation, and 
 to be keenly on the alert to see what the rest of the 
 world was like. 
 
 At a railway station in Rockbridge County I 
 stopped to get one of those luncheons of bread and 
 chicken which the negroes offer on the arrival of the 
 train, and which are the best food to be found in 
 that country. The dogs of the town, all of which 
 come down to the depot to see the train come in, 
 surrounded me and begged in an embarrassing man-
 
 194 A Virginian Village 
 
 ner. But I offered the remains of my lunch to a 
 little bear cub tied behind the hotel. He had been 
 caught a few weeks before by some men who were 
 coming down the mountain on a hand-car. They 
 saw him scurrying away among the bushes and ran 
 after him and caught him. He did not object to be 
 captured and appeared rather willing to see the 
 world. When I offered him my luncheon, he raised 
 himself on his hind-legs, and walked about it deli 
 cately, and smelt of it, and fingered it in that pecu 
 liarly chic way which it is so impossible for a human 
 touch to imitate, and declined with thanks. I asked 
 the bar-tender what he would take, and he said that 
 "if I had any lemon drops, he would like them." 
 But I had no lemon drops. 
 
 One evening I was going along a road which over 
 looked one of the more considerable villages in this 
 part of Virginia, when a boy passed me. As appears 
 to be the habit of these rustics, he turned after he 
 had gone a few feet and spoke to me, saying, "Mis 
 ter, don't you want to see a monkey that nurses a 
 kitten?" "Do you mean to say that the monkey 
 suckles the kitten?" "No, it just holds it in this way" 
 (imitating the action with his arms). " Is the mon 
 key fond of the kitten?" "Not very; it will nurse 
 anything else the same way a rabbit or a guinea- 
 pig." The boy pointed me out the house where he 
 lived, which was not far off, and I promised to come 
 in an hour's time. It was, although not yet sun 
 down, late in the afternoon, at the hour, when the 
 new moon renovates with the fresh arc of her slender 
 circlet the decline of the propitious day. Odd that 
 such a wakeful novelty should be introduced into 
 the heavens at the time when nature is preparing
 
 A Virginian Journey 195 
 
 for repose. It was night when I turned to go, and 
 the sides of the Alleghenies still had some faint hues, 
 worn, no doubt, at that moment by every fading 
 mountain line from the Shenandoah to the Green- 
 brier. 
 
 I presently found the house which the boy had 
 pointed out. There was indeed the monkey. The 
 kitten was put into the monkey's box, and the mon 
 key then proceeded to do'as the boy had said. She 
 seized it in her arms, kissed it, hugged it, and dandled 
 it. The kitten's fore-legs were by its position forced 
 round the neck of the monkey. The kitten's figure 
 was the more humorous of the two. It showed an 
 amusing familiarity with the situation and yet a 
 strong dissent from it, evidently objecting to be thus 
 effaced, and with many cries and grimaces stoutly 
 asserting its feline and non-simian character. It 
 would now and then scratch its foster-mother, who 
 would slap it, and then embrace it still more fondly 
 than before. The monkey's behavior showed that 
 desperate, indiscriminate maternal feeling to be ob 
 served in certain childless women. 
 
 The young naturalist and demonstrator squatted 
 upon his heels, with his little bare feet in the mud, 
 and pointing to the cage, rehearsed the peculiarities 
 of the pair, as he had daily observed them. The 
 commercial idea, however, was evidently stronger 
 in his mind than the scientific one, as he showed by 
 the careful manner in which he scanned, under the 
 moonlight, the coin I gave him. 
 
 The new Virginia is a very different place indeed 
 from that I knew as a boy. In that day I have often 
 ridden over green fields upon which the city of Roa- 
 noke now stands. There have been great material
 
 196 A Virginian Village 
 
 changes; but it is in the spirit of the people rather 
 than in these alterations that the change is to be 
 observed, and this spirit is preparing far greater 
 material changes in the future. The new spirit of 
 enterprise is very surprising to anyone who has 
 known the country in antebellum days, and I cannot 
 say that the new order of things is altogether agree 
 able. 
 
 Of a considerable part of the country lying upon 
 the Roanoke I must, as an idle boy in the old days 
 of slavery, have ridden over almost every foot. As 
 the train struck the bank of the river which I had 
 not seen in thirty years there was no railway in 
 those days a boyish memory of the Roanoke came 
 into my mind. It was of old Ben, a brown horse 
 that used to carry me upon the sides of the Blue 
 Ridge and the Alleghenies, and across the river 
 heads of that well-watered country. I did not mind 
 the sun in those days, not even a Virginian sun, but 
 I think the old horse was never so well contented 
 as when I stopped him in the shade upon a mountain 
 side, and from his back picked the fox grapes or the 
 chicken grapes from the sweet gums that overhung 
 the road, while the Peaks of Otter were glittering 
 forty miles away. The old horse was a rather weari 
 some creature. Familiarity with him had bred con 
 tempt. I had nursed him through the scratches and 
 the distemper, and altogether had found him tire 
 some. I was sitting on him once when the old quad 
 ruped stood up to his belly in the current of the 
 Roanoke, somewhat apart from the loud and violent 
 channels of the river, his nose neglecting the stream 
 which breasted us with strong pulses, his eyes wink 
 ing under the keen blue of the unclouded sky. We
 
 A Virginian Journey 197 
 
 were standing there, our ears stunned with the 
 thunder and the reverberation of the lonely place, 
 when suddenly, his wits perhaps affected by the 
 sounding and moving waters and the solitude of the 
 spot, he relaxed his limbs and rolled luxuriously in 
 the limpid current, leaving me to get ashore as best 
 I could an action revealing an unsuspected inde 
 pendence of the mind. 
 
 It had been years since I had seen that country, 
 but I found it still there. The blue splinters of the 
 Peaks of Otter have not ceased from performing their 
 noonday pranks; Twelve-o'clock Knob will still as 
 tonish you with some manifestation of his immortal 
 and infinitely varied life; the desert places of Roanoke 
 and Rockbridge are still vocal with the wailing of 
 many waters. 
 
 I stopped for a few hours at a little town on the 
 Roanoke, in which I once lived. I remembered it 
 as a very still place; it had now been awakened by a 
 boom. One memory that came back to me seemed 
 most irreconcilable with the bustling modern activity 
 of this little town of boom times, the main street of 
 which now looked a good deal like a town in Pennsyl 
 vania. I have seen standing on the auction block 
 which was formerly in front of that Court House a 
 grinning negro boy, eighteen or twenty years of age, 
 stout-built and very black, much elated with the 
 encomiums of the auctioneer and with the notice 
 of the crowd, while the bidders would come, one by 
 one, and run their hands up and down his legs and 
 feel his chest and arms. I do not remember what 
 he brought. But the boom existed mainly in the 
 principal street, and did not seem to have affected 
 the lanes and by-ways. Along one of these lanes I
 
 198 A Virginian Village 
 
 walked at a late hour of the morning. The season 
 was the end of May, the landscape wonderfully 
 green, and sweet odors were flowing from the pores 
 of the loosened, heated earth. There was lavish sun 
 everywhere, and yet it was not hot. Above me was 
 the white edifice of the sunlit air, scintillating with 
 prismatic hues, replete with warmth to the point 
 of saturation, replete also with the incense of roses, 
 and of the flowers of the late blossoming fruit trees, 
 and alive with a reckless tumult from the throbbing 
 songs of birds. And yet with all this activity there 
 was satiety, and Nature was contented. Walking 
 towards that part of the place in which a college is 
 standing, I found an old garden, quite shut out from 
 the rest of the village, in which the grass was thick 
 and high, and there were quantities of roses in full 
 bloom. A long path led from the gate to the house. 
 Here I remained for a little while, wondering at the 
 seclusion of the spot. Presently the gate opened, 
 and an old man with books under his arm walked up 
 the path, in whom I recognized with some difficulty 
 an old preceptor. I remembered him as a man in 
 the prime of life; he would now have sat for a repre 
 sentation of conventional old age. He did not recog 
 nize me, and perhaps scarcely remembered me. We 
 spoke of the change in the South. But there was no 
 change in the spot on which we stood. That green 
 enclosure, stirred only by the airs of the early sum 
 mer, did not seem to be aware of the boom which 
 was boiling in the main street of the village. The top 
 of Twelve-o'clock Knob and the belfry of the adja 
 cent college were the only objects which could see 
 into it. There was a faint murmur of learning from 
 beyond the neighboring lilac hedge, the only com-
 
 A Virginian Journey 199 
 
 pany suitable to the blowing grasses and severe roses 
 of the peaceful garden. I asked about the fortunes 
 of the little university. Of course, it was sadly in need 
 of money for its "fund" for the purchase of chem 
 ical apparatus and for its other "fund" for the com 
 pletion of the "Hall of Science," and it had just 
 selected one of that new sort of college presidents, a 
 young man chosen for his "executive ability," which 
 means that he understands how to get this money. 
 One's impression was, however: "I know that you are 
 not very pecunious. But I dare say learning may be 
 pursued as well under the protection of your some 
 what straitened muses, and within call of the bell 
 in yonder cupola, as if you had a million or two from 
 some great railroad man or operator in stocks; and 
 that there are books enough upon the cool and silent 
 shelves not too well filled of your rustic library 
 to teach all the philosophy one requires, if one would 
 only appropriate it and take it to heart, as I know 
 you have done." 
 
 When I admired his roses, the old man said: "Yes, 
 it is a good selection; it was made by my wife; she 
 died two years ago." He mentioned certain persons 
 who could talk to me of former days; to this I sug 
 gested that the renewal of these acquaintanceships, 
 although a pleasure, was, perhaps, a melancholy one. 
 "It would be so if it were not for the hope of meeting 
 in a better world," said the old man, still standing 
 among his roses. He seemed to wish to talk, but a 
 painful expression crossed his face and he began to 
 cough. He said: "I have been suffering a good deal 
 from the asthma of late; it is troubling me to-day," 
 and expressing a wish to serve me, he disappeared 
 into the house. So like old age, with one eye fixed
 
 2OO A Virginian Village 
 
 feebly upon the highest spiritual ideas, and the other, 
 and apparently the stronger one, upon the infirmities 
 of the body. 
 
 From this old home on the Roanoke I went to a 
 still older one, my native village on the Greenbrier. 
 This is a hundred miles to the west, on the summit 
 of the Alleghenies. In making this journey, you cross 
 the water-shed which divides the streams which flow 
 directly into the Atlantic from those which flow into 
 the Mississippi. The Greenbrier and the Cow- 
 pasture Rivers are west of this water-shed. It was 
 almost sundown when the train went along the banks 
 of the Cow-pasture. To me it is not a pleasant 
 thought that these mountain waters are to find their 
 way into the strange and muddy Mississippi. In 
 that remote and doleful scene, do they remember, I 
 wonder, the hour when they lay so much nearer the 
 sky, in their rock-strewn, plashy bed on the roof of 
 the Alleghenies, amid the dreaming valleys of the 
 Cow-pasture River, under the brooding mountains, 
 and shone on by the evening star's yellow light? 
 
 My native village is 2,500 feet above the sea, and 
 has mountains about it which are 4,000 feet. The 
 verdure of the country is very strong; the cause of 
 this is probably the blue-grass, which is an indigenous 
 and natural growth, and does not have to be planted. 
 It is only necessary to ring the forest anywhere, 
 and it will spring up. It is found all the way up the 
 sides and on the tops of the highest mountains. 
 And yet it cannot be altogether the blue-grass which 
 gives the country its verdure, for the trees have the 
 same strong hues as the grass. Perhaps it is the 
 character of the soil which gives to both this strength; 
 the fields and farms, as you walk among them, show
 
 A Virginian Journey 201 
 
 such a living green, so fresh and gay, with a Southern 
 wealth, yet free and clear as the North, and sound 
 as new milk. The trees crowd the sides of the moun 
 tains, from the exquisite curves into which the slopes 
 dip near their bases to where their summits encounter 
 the morning blue. 
 
 The village, which has 1,000 people, and which 
 up to the time of the war was the leading one within 
 fifty miles, lies in a depression, and is on this account 
 sometimes called "the saucer village." The street 
 is an ellipse which descends from one hill top and 
 rises to another, the two hills being about a mile 
 apart and the greater part of the village in the middle 
 at the bottom. The place does not look as if it had 
 a future or much of a present, but it has obviously had 
 a past. There is plenty of dilapidation, which you 
 see to some extent in the brick houses, which are yet 
 too substantially built to be injured by neglect, 
 and still more plainly in the wooden houses. And 
 yet a number of the nouses show thrift and comfort, 
 have broad, two-story piazzas and nice gardens. 
 
 The village has the verdure common to that coun 
 try, but perhaps that of the village is made all the 
 stronger by contrast with the red brick houses and 
 red roses. At any rate, I have a feeling there of 
 being encompassed by greenness. I don't know 
 whether it is greener in wet or dry weather, although 
 I should be inclined to say on wet days. Late on a 
 wet afternoon the street on the east end of the town 
 takes a dip downward upon a mixture of brick and 
 wooden houses and green sod and rose gardens, 
 half concealed among oaks, elms, and blossoming 
 locusts, the air, by the way, very strong with the 
 powerfully sweet smell of the locust flowers. There
 
 202 A Virginian Village 
 
 are, I may add, certain smells, which, wherever I 
 have known them, have always brought me back 
 to this place. I thought I should try and find out 
 what they were. One is locust. There is also the 
 smell of boxwood. Then there is the acid smell of 
 sour grass, and there are other smells which one is 
 not able to grasp or name before they are gone. One, 
 which I had supposed to be recondite and mysterious, 
 I find to be simply that of the breath of cows. But 
 this you find mostly in the back streets, of which there 
 are two, running parallel with the main street, one on 
 either side of it, and which are perfectly green and 
 covered with close-cropped sod. On one of these 
 back lanes there is still standing a stable, which lay 
 at the extreme corner of a most familiar garden. 
 In former and more prosperous days, of which the 
 old " black mammy," Harriet, was the historian, it 
 had had three or four horses; at the time of which I 
 am speaking it had nothing but fleas. It was alive 
 with them. I soon learned to give it a wide berth, 
 even in the road passing it on the other side; as it 
 lay remote under the sun in the corner of the garden, 
 shunned even by the hardy currants and sunflowers, 
 it seemed, to the sensitive imagination and cuticle of 
 childhood, fairly to tingle. 
 
 The village is pretty far to the south, and the 
 weather in midsummer is usually clear, and is hot 
 also. The vegetation has a semi-tropical profusion. 
 This is evident in the way the roses grow. A brick 
 house about two miles from the town, with which I 
 have been familiar from a child, has a two-story 
 verandah in front, of which an old rose bush covers 
 both stories. I asked a cousin a middle-aged wom 
 an, in whom a girlish face of former days looked
 
 A Virginian Journey 203 
 
 out from such irrelevant accessories as gray hair and 
 lines on the forehead and about the eyes when it 
 was planted. She had been born in this house and 
 lived there all her life, yet it had been there as long as 
 she could remember. These bushes are visited by 
 humming birds, although I think they are more apt 
 to be seen on the porches covered with honeysuckles. 
 But it is the hum of that sleeping projectile, the 
 bumble bee, which is the voice of these rose trees 
 a much lustier creature than the Northern one, 
 twice the size perhaps, with a much broader expanse 
 of cloth of gold upon his back, and conducting him 
 self with a swagger and a saturnine dignity like a 
 bull's; formidable and with a look of momentum 
 about him; scarcely conscious of that reserved 
 armory of offense you are careful not to awaken, 
 and yet expecting like emperors and other dangerous 
 things to be got out of the way of, he hangs amid the 
 sun-laden atmosphere of his fragrant den near the 
 thorn, the canker-worm, and the blossom. The 
 village is full of these rose trees. At night especially 
 the air is very strong with the smell of them. The 
 spreading branches of the oaks and evergreens keep 
 to earth the fragrance of the gardens, which amid 
 summer sights and odors seem to await the moon- 
 rise; and presently, preceded by upward streaming 
 roseate lights and vapors, the edge of the moon, peer 
 ing above the rim of the illumined hill, in an instant 
 gilds the vast scene. 
 
 My village is a place that few people have ever 
 heard of, and which has a humble opinion of itself. 
 It nevertheless receives within its modest horizon 
 visitors of some note. The brilliant Venus, subject 
 of forgotten poets, looks down upon our lanes and
 
 204 A Virginian Village 
 
 gardens; and I have seen the little Presbyterian 
 steeple keep the sky, as twin occupant, with Saturn, 
 worshipped on Chaldean plains as the " highest star 
 in Heaven," before the Man of Ur went to found a 
 nation in Canaan. It is, in my judgment, a beautiful 
 village. Even in the morning, when the strong sun 
 brings to light the shabbiness of the shops and houses, 
 and renders faint and dull the green of the hills, 
 and makes still whiter the white limestone rocks 
 of the hill-sides, it is pleasant to see. But as the 
 afternoon advances the beauty of the place begins 
 to surprise you. If, at a late hour of the afternoon, 
 especially after a shower, you are looking down upon 
 it from one of the surrounding hills, the appearance 
 of the village, with its glancing lights and its brilliant 
 red and emerald hues, is like that sudden, vivid ex 
 pression of an infant, when alone he turns his bright 
 smile upon his mother and reveals to her wondering 
 eye his incredible beauty of mind. Then comes the 
 sunset, and a little later a planet or two appear on 
 high. Next the light of a lamp is seen at a door or 
 window, and the household lights then begin to move 
 about. Perhaps there is something interesting about 
 these first wandering lights of the village. It is as 
 if the human heart would answer to those unregarding 
 planets, which in their sapphire depths stand with 
 such strength and youth from their ancient journeys, 
 the faint, far glimmering ray of a gentle but tranquil 
 hope. 
 
 There are three or four churches in the village. 
 There is a brick church, which was the property of 
 the Methodists, but which during the war was given 
 to the negroes. A hole in the wall of this building, 
 made by a cannon-ball which passed through it,
 
 A Virginian Journey 205 
 
 is still to be seen; the negroes have utilized the aper 
 ture by running out of it a stove-pipe with an elbow. 
 The whites, thus ejected from their own church, 
 have built a small frame one not far away. Another 
 is the Episcopalian, but, as it is not rich enough to 
 have a clergyman, it is for the most part closed, and 
 seems in its significant quiet to invite a query from 
 the other meeting houses, whether its god is asleep 
 or gone upon a journey. But the leading faith of the 
 country is the Presbyterian. This is mainly due to 
 the fact that the people are nearly all of Scotch- 
 Irish descent. The Presbyterian church, a stone one, 
 very clean and substantial, was built about 1790. 
 The village graveyard surrounds it. This might 
 really be called the State church of the community, 
 which from the adjacent valleys for many miles 
 around comes to the Sunday morning service. The 
 young minister is a very good preacher. The choir 
 is composed mostly of young ladies, the young men 
 having left for more thriving parts. The Presby 
 terians, I believe, make much of their hymnology, 
 perhaps because their service is in other respects 
 devoid of effort to please or attract. Yet I am not 
 sure that there is not something striking and pic 
 turesque in the severity of this ritual, as perhaps 
 there is also in the definite and uncompromising creed 
 of this denomination, its aggressive tone and its 
 executive form of church government. People 
 holding this creed might be expected to express them 
 selves with some joyfulness, which they do in their 
 vigorous hymnology. One gets an impression of 
 joyful energy in listening to the choir of a dozen 
 young women in the stone church on a Sunday 
 morning, where under a midsummer sky of unclouded
 
 206 A Virginian Village 
 
 blue, amid cleanly rocks, bordered by rills of purest 
 limestone water, and in an atmosphere scented by the 
 white blossoms of the rude and simple blackberry 
 vines, they asseverate, with really tuneful voices 
 and a good volume of bold sound, that " God will 
 their strength and refuge prove," or admonish the 
 " trembling saints " to " fresh courage," or approach 
 Deity with some such confident and familiar strain 
 as "Come, thou Almighty King." 
 
 It is curious in this country to see the compro 
 mise between the thrift and vigor of the Scotch-Irish 
 stock on the one side and the results of slavery on 
 the other. The energy of the people was, of course, 
 affected by slavery; even in their most prosperous 
 days they had not the vigor of free populations; 
 the war ruined them and they have not recovered 
 from the poverty in which it left them. You see the 
 effects of this poverty in the graveyard which sur 
 rounds the Presbyterian church, which is indeed the 
 Greenbrier burying ground. People have died, and 
 their relatives have meant to mark the graves, but 
 the money which might have gone to build monu 
 ments has been needed from day to day and week to 
 week. The pious intentions cool with time and with 
 the unremitting pressure of everyday affairs; and 
 it is by-and-by thought that the dead can better 
 afford to wait than the living. The result is that 
 the graves remain unmarked save by the unbought 
 magnificence of the roses, with which, from end to 
 end, the churchyard is filled abundantly. These 
 wave throughout the livelong summer's day, as if 
 in atonement for the narrow circumstances or the 
 sordid forgetfulness of the survivors; while the people 
 go about their quiet occupations, the roses, in their
 
 A Virginian Journey 207 
 
 unnoticed enclosure on the edge of the village, still 
 wave and toss to the blue sky, as if importunately 
 calling the living to the recollection and commemora 
 tion of the dead. 
 
 The only industry of this country was the raising 
 of sheep, cattle, and horses. It had at one time 
 extremely good horses. General Lee's favorite horse 
 "Traveller" was from Greenbrier, being the colt 
 of a thoroughbred horse out of a common mare of the 
 country; General Curtis Lee told me he had four 
 white feet, a defect, if it be one, which he shares with 
 many famous horses. General Lee, I believe, tried 
 to find the dam of " Traveller " in Greenbrier, but 
 did not succeed. The Greenbrier region is too moun 
 tainous for agriculture on a large scale, and no mines 
 have ever been opened there; the modern boom has 
 not affected it. The people go on raising very fair 
 stock. In the future, as their fortunes improve, 
 which they are pretty sure to do, a better strain of 
 horses will be introduced. It is, indeed, somewhat 
 difficult to see how it can pay to bring good horses 
 into the country for breeding, when not more than 
 $10 can be charged for service; and certainly a farmer 
 cannot pay more than this who has to keep a colt 
 for three or four years and then sell him for $100. 
 But better prices will come with improved stock; 
 the people should at least have as good horses as 
 they once had, and their horses were formerly very 
 good. My own earliest equine recollections are con 
 nected with this country, and with a certain " Dusty 
 Miller," an old dun horse, of infinite patience and 
 paternal feeling. He was at that time well on in the 
 twenties, the period of his birth and youth being, of 
 course, lost in the dimmest antiquity. The name,
 
 208 A Virginian Village 
 
 as applied to a dun horse, probably had reference 
 to the yellowish color of meal, with which a Vir 
 ginian miller would be likely to be covered. I in 
 quired about him of the cousin above mentioned: 
 she exclaimed, surprised and pleased, " Why, do 
 you remember 'Dusty Miller '?" I did indeed. My 
 uncle, her father, was not one of those who thought 
 anything was good enough for little boys. He al 
 ways had for us a nice sheepskin, which he had dyed 
 black so that it might not look dirty (or did he save 
 the black sheepskins ?) and a surcingle to go round it 
 a most comfortable seat. If anyone, it may be 
 added, wishes a monument, perhaps not more en 
 during than brass, but almost as good as a shiny 
 white tombstone, such as that which now marks the 
 good colonel's grave in the Greenbrier Churchyard, 
 and which in a few decades will be overrun with 
 strong grasses and obliterated by tangled wild roses, 
 let him do intelligent kindnesses to children. 
 
 A horse is a necessity in this country. Fortunately 
 it is not expensive to have one. One hundred and 
 fifty dollars will buy a good horse, and you can keep 
 him for $2 a week. But you must ride in the morn 
 ings and evenings. An excellent arrangement of the 
 day would be this. Rise early, for this country is 
 pretty far to the south, and the sun soon gets hot. 
 Ride for an hour or two and come back to a bath and 
 breakfast. Read or write in the morning. The 
 prospects from your window are pleasing. It is very 
 still; you hear nothing but the busy song of birds and 
 the wind among the leaves; the village streets are 
 almost as quiet as the gardens. There is no distrac 
 tion, except when a bumble bee comes in at the open 
 window, ih which case you are, perhaps, for a while
 
 A Virginian Journey 209 
 
 constrained by the presence of this splendid person 
 age, and secretly wish your oppressively distinguished 
 company would exercise the royal privilege of bring 
 ing the interview to a close. I never found any place 
 where I could read with more advantage than here. 
 You dine at two, and in the afterr :>on sleep a good 
 deal, or sit about the village stores and taverns, or 
 walk in some neighboring wood. You ride again 
 at six and get back at eight, when it is dark, to tea, 
 which should be a substantial one. The food of the 
 country will do very well: fried chicken, excellent 
 salads and raw tomatoes, strawberries, raspberries 
 and peaches with cream, and various kinds of cake, 
 in the preparation of which the people have great 
 skill. For an hour or two in the evening the best 
 thing to do is to sit about the odorous verandahs 
 of which mention has been made, in the company of 
 some good-looking young people. With this schedule 
 in view, I know of no better place to spend the 
 summers in than my native village. 
 
 No doubt the most interesting peculiarity of Vir 
 ginia and of Southern society is the black population. 
 The perplexing nature of the race problem lends an 
 interest to that society which is wanting to the garish 
 and commonplace prosperity of the North. The 
 problem is, no doubt, a tragic one. How are the 
 races to live together separate and yet in accord? 
 Or are they to be for ever separate? What will be 
 the solution of the remote future? And yet, from my 
 observation, I should say that the concern which is 
 commonly expressed on this subject is rather of the 
 nature of borrowing trouble. The relations of the 
 races are fairly comfortable and grow more comfort 
 able. The negroes or, as they prefer to be called,
 
 21 A Virginian Village 
 
 the colored people are getting to have more self- 
 respect than they had formerly. They are clever 
 enough to be educated, as anyone may see by at 
 tending the schools. The education given them is, 
 perhaps, rather imitative, and, it may be, does not 
 sufficiently take account of race characteristics. I 
 went to one high school in Virginia, and was present 
 at a class of English literature, taught by the princi 
 pal, an intelligent mulatto. The young men and 
 women were parsing and criticising, of all subjects 
 under the sun, Pope's "Rape of the Lock!" The 
 amusing feature of the exercise was that neither 
 teacher nor pupil, so far as I could see, were within a 
 thousand miles of it. But, on the other hand, what 
 could be more remote from the simple and saccharine 
 characteristics of the negro nature than the elegant 
 artificiality and the refined exaggeration of this work? 
 But I dare say the colored people are quite capable 
 of receiving suitable literary education. 
 
 The black population, of course, profoundly dis 
 tinguishes Southern society from that of the North. 
 Among the peculiarities to be observed in that so 
 ciety which are due to the presence of the blacks, 
 I will mention one which is important. The common 
 notion, and it was my own, is that the aristocratic 
 quality of Southern society disappeared with the 
 abolition of slavery. My Virginian journey gave 
 me a different notion. The fact of the presence of a 
 great class, separated from the rest of the community 
 by the color of their skin, and ready to do menial 
 labor, will, it appears to me, always give an aristo 
 cratic quality to the society of the South which other 
 parts of the Union will not have. The circumstances 
 of life in the North compel a democratic tone. Every-
 
 A Virginian Journey 211 
 
 body there postpones being a gentleman: the poor 
 man will be a gentleman when he is rich, the rich 
 man when he has the leisure. Owing, however, to 
 the presence of the negroes, it is easy in the South 
 for even a poor man to have this feeling. There is 
 always a member of that race at h ind to look after 
 his horse, or carry his bag, or black his boots. This 
 condition of life in the South must have its effect 
 upon the tone of society at large. It is, perhaps, 
 owing to this peculiarity as well as to the advantages 
 of climate, soil, and scenery which the State has, 
 that Virginia is so favorite a place for the English. 
 There are great numbers of English in Virginia, and 
 those of them who have the qualities which give 
 success in other parts of the world get on well there, 
 and, I believe, usually like the country.
 
 CONTRASTS OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN 
 SCENERY 
 
 HAVING lately visited England after a long 
 absence, my mind, both there and since my 
 return, has been busy with the subject of the re 
 lations between our scenery and that of the Old 
 World. I visited a dull part of Hampshire; on 
 leaving the house where I was staying, it was neces 
 sary to get up to an early breakfast to catch a train. 
 Two young soldiers, very pleasant and friendly fel 
 lows, who went away at the same time, were in the 
 cab with me. Reference was made to the scenery, 
 and one of them, who had been in America, said, 
 "You Americans may not always say you admire 
 England, but in your hearts you know there is noth 
 ing like it." I looked out of the cab window at the 
 flat and very rolled-out landscape, cut up into squares 
 and plots by iron fences, which, however, with its 
 sparse oaks standing here and there, was not without 
 a classic grace, and thought of the fresh and magic 
 outlines of the Virginian mountains. But the hour 
 was much too early and too drowsy to allow of any 
 expression of dissent. It is an old question, that 
 between the scenery of the two worlds. It is a 
 simple one, however, with an obvious answer. Here 
 it is primeval and virgin nature; there, nature 
 affected by man and art. 
 
 The difference between European and American 
 trees and woodlands is significant of this. Early 
 in September an acquaintance took me to look at a
 
 Contrasts of English and American Scenery 213 
 
 remarkable oak on his place in Essex, which he said 
 had been thought by some persons to be a relic of 
 the ancient British forest. This oak, which was not 
 very high, threw its powerful arms straight out in 
 all directions over a wide space of ground. Certainly 
 such a tree could not have stood in an aboriginal 
 forest. There would not have been sufficient sun 
 to produce so great an amount of leafage, and there 
 would have been no room for such a vast lateral ex 
 tension. It so happened that only a few months 
 before, in June perhaps, I had seen in Tennessee a 
 good deal of a forest which was almost virgin. The 
 trees went straight upward to a great height, the 
 boles being clean of branches a long distance from 
 the ground, and the leafage scant except at the top, 
 where it received the sun. I rode into the middle 
 of this forest. The trees were often so close together 
 that it would have been hard for a horse to go be 
 tween them, and my horse followed the bed of a 
 stream which was so shallow that it scarcely more 
 than wet his fetlocks, the rhododendrons being very 
 thick on each side of me. Halting in the midst of 
 the level floor of the forest, it was an impressive 
 scene which I found. The pale and lofty trunks 
 stood everywhere parallel, and with a stately de 
 corum and regularity, except where, halfway up the 
 adjacent mountain-side, some tumbling trees, lean 
 ing at angles against their surrounding fellows, which 
 had arrested them in falling, varied the universal 
 propriety with a noble confusion, the gray trunks 
 looking like mighty fallen pillars of a ruined temple. 
 The serried columns seemed to await the deep-toned 
 adoration of some procession of chanting Druids. 
 The scene around me was without a voice such
 
 314 A Virginian Village 
 
 faint, occasional twitter of bird life as there was 
 serving only to deepen the stillness. Where was 
 the voice of the place? There was continuous twi 
 light, touched here and there by some stray sun 
 beam which a rift overhead had let through. At 
 the foot of some vast column I found the morning- 
 glory, surprised in such a place to come upon this 
 ornament of the domestic sill, and companion of the 
 bright face of childhood. But the hue of its glisten 
 ing cup was as fresh and dewy amid these religious 
 shadows as if in some sunlighted and human garden 
 spot; the flower, however, not without a sense of 
 exile, and conscious, as it seemed to me, of the ab 
 sence of those welcome voices and shining faces of 
 the cottage door. 
 
 It is true that our scenery is not rich in its associa 
 tions of human history. This source of interest we 
 have here only to a slight degree. But the land 
 scape has its own history. Is it not well to con 
 sider that history? Is not scenery made more im 
 pressive by the study of those sublime changes which 
 have prepared the world which we see, and may not 
 the disclosures of men % of science, so far as the un 
 learned are capable of comprehending them, be 
 brought to the service of the sense of natural beauty? 
 There are, indeed, times when one fancies that the 
 historic facts linger on the face of nature. Chau- 
 tauqua Lake, in the southwestern part of the State 
 of New York, not many miles south of Lake Erie, is 
 a fine sheet of clear water, a few miles long, and per 
 haps a mile wide. One perfectly clear evening I sat 
 in a boat on the lake, the quiet surface of which was 
 encompassed by a crimson stain possessing the entire 
 circle of the horizon, with the pale azure of the sky
 
 Contrasts of English and American Scenery 215 
 
 above without a cloud. The red hues were in the 
 air and upon the bosom of the lake. The only other 
 occupant of the boat was a young girl, whose youth 
 ful coloring was blended with, and was a part of, that 
 in the air and upon the waters. We spoke of the 
 mighty change of which this still lake had once been 
 the scene. The lake's outlet was at one time north 
 ward into Lake Erie, and through the St. Lawrence 
 to the ocean. But the Ice Age came, and dumped 
 a lot of debris to the north of Chautauqua, which 
 forced the waters of the lake southward into the 
 Ohio, so that they now seek the Atlantic through the 
 Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. A reminiscence 
 of those boreal ages lingered on the chill shores and 
 in the crystal heavens, a sense of the pole and of 
 arctic scenes. Of this mighty event we talked, two 
 waifs or motes floating in the atmosphere of the 
 roseate evening, as transient as the diaphanous 
 vapors which surrounded us. 
 
 Another contrast there may be in the scenery of 
 the two lands. There is this to be said of English 
 scenery: it is suitable to the luxury and comfort of 
 English country life. It is appropriate to the Eng 
 lish flesh-pots. There are plenty of country-houses 
 throughout England in which material comforts 
 are of the best, and which at certain seasons 
 contain much agreeable company of both sexes. I 
 had some experience of such a house in Surrey. The 
 library was excellent; for a wonder the weather was 
 good, the ephemeral British sunshine remaining all 
 day on the southern walls, and really lavish among 
 those flowers of the garden you do not perhaps know 
 by name. Easily detained by such an existence you 
 are not inclined to anything more active than some
 
 216 A Virginian Village 
 
 kind of pleasant reading, and are likely to lose your 
 place at that, while your gaze rests upon the hills to 
 the west. To such a life and such a state of mind the 
 vague, soft aspect of the Surrey hills was most suit 
 able two impalpable ranges of hills, alluring to the 
 eyes. Essences they seemed, rather than substance 
 or matter, and unreal, save in their gentle, emerald 
 coloring; and they were always lying there, quiver 
 ing as in a dream a mirage which did not go away. 
 
 If there is an agreement between luxury and Eng 
 lish scenery, my sentiment is that, on the contrary, 
 luxury does not suit our scenery. An iron foundry, 
 strange to say, does no harm; a forge, a factory by 
 the side of a pond filled with water-lilies (I have now 
 in mind the New England landscape) these are not 
 unsuitable. But a fine house in some way is. Ar 
 chitecture, both private and public, should be such 
 as is suited to the local requirements and history. A 
 white spire, for instance, marking such a church as 
 New England farmers have built for generations, 
 what an eloquent object in a wide and undulating 
 view! The manner of life should be simple also. 
 An eight o'clock dinner and champagne are out of 
 place. People should dine in the middle of the day. 
 The evening meal, however, should be late, for it is 
 a serious mistake to take the hour of sunset, for 
 which the twenty-four have been a preparation, as 
 one in which to eat something. In our semi-tropical 
 summer people should adopt the tropical habit of 
 rising early; it will do, however, if they are out of 
 doors, say, within an hour after sunrise, for it is not 
 till then that the dawn becomes "incense-breath 
 ing"; this quality the air has not acquired when the 
 sun first appears. And yet it seems a great pity
 
 Contrasts of English and American Scenery 217 
 
 that the sunrise, that most auspicious of nature's 
 facts, should not be noticed, at any rate from one's 
 bedroom window. Its advent is never so benign as 
 in a sky without a cloud; the orb, as it emerges, 
 kindling the rim of the verdant meadow with cheer 
 ful promise irresistible sign of life and friend of man.
 
 CUMBERLAND GAP 
 
 SUNRISE on four States. I have been seeing that 
 for a month past. Virginia and Kentucky divide 
 the mountain-top on which stands my shanty; I can 
 almost throw a stone into Tennessee; and, across 
 Tennessee, can see North Carolina. 
 
 I have seldom seen the sun rise, and am therefore 
 getting up a new subject. The air at sunrise is 
 languid. The moon has more to do with dawn than 
 I supposed. I have seen it almost in the zenith, full 
 and splendid amid the borrowed crimson hues which 
 encompass it; secure and serene, like old dynasties 
 just before their hour of dissolution. The sun has 
 just risen, clear and modest; and you wonder by 
 what gradations the full orb, which remains above 
 with such promise of permanence, is to get out of the 
 way with decency. That happens in this manner; 
 it contrives to be forgotten. Later you think to look 
 for the moon, and you discover, far down in the west, 
 an unreal, silvered sphere or spheroid, which imi 
 tates the complexion of the sky, escaping among the 
 tops of the Cumberland Mountains. 
 
 But the moon's hour will return. To-night she 
 will be at her old station, hearkening to all the noises, 
 the cries of the insect sexes, with which the land of 
 Tennessee is audible. 
 
 There were days when I saw the sunrise through 
 the window from my cot. But a sapling obscured 
 my view of it, and I asked permission to cut the tree 
 down. I was told that I might do that if it was on 
 the Virginia side, but not if it was on the Kentucky
 
 Cumberland Gap 219 
 
 side. It was on the Virginia side, and I went, like 
 Boone himself, ax in hand, and felled the sapling. 
 It was a sassafras tree. Perhaps, by the way, I 
 ought not to have cut down sassafras; I know it is 
 considered bad luck in this country to burn that 
 wood. There are many mountaineers of this region 
 who would not burn sassafras on any account. 
 
 It is, of course, the line of the water-shed which 
 constitutes the State boundary. Now an elevation of 
 a few inches will often turn water. So on this moun 
 tain top, it is possible for so humble an individual 
 as myself, with a spade, in the course of a few min 
 utes to affect the confines of empire. 
 
 And now the strengthening sun dispels the mist 
 over Tennessee plain and Kentucky vale, and quick 
 ens the atmosphere with wholesome force, and evokes 
 from the soil and shrubbery of our mountain their 
 morning fragrance. But I go to the shed, where 
 breakfast is being cooked by the man and the boy 
 who are my only companions, and inhale rather the 
 odors of the stew and the coffee. What luck to have 
 found a good cook on this mountain! 
 
 I have already fed my horse. There is no stable 
 and no feed, and I am obliged every evening to bring 
 up his oats in saddle-bags from the boom town in the 
 Valley, a distance of five miles. The start down the 
 mountain is early. The descent among the sun- 
 flecked shadows of that forest road will be pleasant. 
 On the way to the town I turn to the left over 
 Cumberland Gap to give my horse a drink in the 
 immense spring of sweetest and purest freestone 
 water, which issues from a cave in the mountain 
 side. I am almost as much pleased as he is, when he 
 dips his nose into that crystal pool.
 
 TYPES OF KENTUCKY SADDLE-HORSES 
 
 I SPENT two months in Kentucky in the '903 with 
 the view of seeing the Kentucky saddle-horse in his 
 own country, and the present paper gives the result of 
 my observations. By the term "Kentucky saddle- 
 horse" is usually meant the Denmark horse (the 
 descendant of the famous Denmark, a thoroughbred 
 foaled in 1839, and of many of his progeny that have 
 borne the same name), and that horse still holds a 
 very important place among Kentucky horses. It 
 is, however, I think, not widely understood to how 
 great a degree the horse now trained for saddle use 
 in Kentucky is a mixture of various strains of blood 
 with the Denmark stock, and especially how much 
 he usually has of trotting blood. Most of the horses 
 I shall here refer to are a mixture of the Denmark 
 strain with trotting stock. 
 
 Of the Denmark horse there has been started 
 within a few years an official register. This horse 
 has great merits and some faults. The faults of the 
 animal are due to the fact that in the breeding of 
 him the Kentuckians have gone in for beauty, which 
 they have believed to be the same thing as smooth 
 ness. The result is that they have bred the withers 
 off of many of the horses. I know that they will 
 deny this; they will tell you that the withers do not 
 show because Kentucky horses are fat; that if their 
 horses were as thin as horses elsewhere are they 
 would show the same frame. I cannot, however, 
 agree with this opinion. You see a great many
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 221 
 
 withers that are unquestionably flat and thick. With 
 withers of this kind there frequently go a straight 
 shoulder, and a neck, often short, that runs out and 
 then up like that of a goose. With the straight 
 shoulder there is usually combined a want of knee 
 action. The beautiful Black Squirrel, a very favor 
 ite Kentucky stallion, is a type of the best of these 
 horses. Kentuckians think this type very beautiful; 
 they hold, indeed, that this is the most beautiful of 
 all horses. You who prefer the straight lines of an 
 English hunter, and to whom that softness, that 
 look of a gelatine roller, which many Kentucky 
 horses have, is not pleasant, may not agree with them. 
 But you have not seen the Kentucky horse under 
 the right conditions. When the animal is brought 
 from the stall into the paddock, held on to by the 
 colored attendant, soft and pampered with high 
 feeding, brilliant with the best of care and grooming, 
 and rank with life and fine blood, it is impossible 
 to deny that he is handsome. As for those soft 
 outlines which you dislike, a thoroughbred when 
 fat has the same. 
 
 The Kentuckians have bred for beauty and charm, 
 and they have got them. There is a charm about 
 the Kentucky horse that perhaps no other American 
 horse has. No other animals I have met in the 
 country exist in the memory with quite the fascina 
 tion of certain horses I have seen in Kentucky. 
 There was, for instance, a few miles from Lexington, 
 a roan gelding that had this fascination to a high 
 degree. He had the graceful Kentucky character 
 istics and yet with a difference. His beauty ap 
 peared particularly in the shape of the rump and in 
 the carriage of the tail. There was an exquisite
 
 222 A Virginian Village 
 
 trick in the conformation of the quarters. " Charm 
 ing and very Kentucky," you said, as you looked at 
 them, and yet you felt you had never seen quite 
 that before. It was perhaps a bold fight nearer the 
 Kentucky ideal than you had seen. This quality 
 of the figure was certainly due to an infusion of the 
 Denmark grace. The tail was the other chief beauty. 
 There was an airy grace in the carriage of it which 
 reminded you of the fortunate work of some archi 
 tect of genius. "What have you done to him?" 
 I said, referring to the graceful lightness with which 
 the tail was held. "Nothing," said the farmer; 
 "as you drive out of the gate you will see his old 
 dam in the pasture to the left, and you will see that 
 she carries just the same tail that he does." I did 
 look at the mare on the way out, and it was so. 
 This carriage of the tail is also a Denmark charac 
 teristic. It is said, by the way, that this tail has been 
 transmitted to the Kentucky horses from the Arab 
 progenitor of the English thoroughbred, and that the 
 trait is due to the fact that the hair was not allowed 
 to grow upon the tail of an Arab till he was five years 
 old; the custom of keeping the tail shaved, observed 
 through many generations, made it thus light and 
 easily held up. 
 
 The finest animal I saw in the State was in Bourbon 
 County (Kentuckians call it "Burbon"). One rather 
 chilly April afternoon, at the Bourbon House in Paris, 
 Kentucky, I was sitting by the stove, and got into 
 conversation with a modest and trustworthy looking 
 farmer. He said he lived some fifteen miles back in 
 the country, that he had some horses, and that his 
 neighbors had some good ones. I might, he said, 
 drive out with him and spend the night and see his
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 223 
 
 horses, and he would then take me to see those of his 
 neighbors. A Kentuckian is always ready to do this. 
 This accommodating spirit is very characteristic of 
 the country. I have been in regions outside of Ken 
 tucky where the people were not so willing to give 
 their neighbors a chance to compete with them 
 selves. But a Kentuckian who has shown you his 
 horses will almost certainly say, "If you don't fancy 
 what I have, my neighbor has a brown gelding that 
 is very nice; and Tom Saunders, who lives five miles 
 south of here, has a very good mare." Not only 
 will he do this, but he will hitch up and take you to 
 see these horses. On the road he will think of others, 
 or will learn about them. A neighbor is met on the 
 turnpike driving a pacing stallion, a famous per 
 former, of which you are given an interesting account. 
 Of this neighbor he asks, "Has Saunders sold his 
 mare?" "I don't know," is the answer; "but Jim 
 Rogers has a bay that is mighty near a good actor." 
 Then a detour of two miles to the left to see Jim 
 Rogers. These wanderings are very pleasant. 
 
 Accordingly, I got with my new acquaintance 
 into his cart one of those two-wheeled vehicles 
 which you enter from behind, and which are much 
 easier to get into than out of. The road lay through 
 a fine region of rolling pasture-lands, and among 
 frequent plantations of oak and hickory, which were 
 also pasture, the stems of the leafless trees standing 
 rather sparsely in the blue-grass, which had got 
 bright with the first really effective heats of April, 
 and spread all round us a carpet of novel verdure. 
 Until one has got used to it, being driven about in 
 this way aifects one with a torpor which is not disa 
 greeable; and in such a state of mind I heard from my
 
 224 A Virginian Village 
 
 companion a series of discourses upon certain horses 
 and horsemen of the neighborhood. Our road 
 brought us to a country which had a very attractive 
 air of quiet and seclusion, and of separation from the 
 noisy places of the world. It was not a new country; 
 on the contrary, it was an old country and village 
 an old neighborhood, indeed, but a remote and 
 peaceful one. At the post-office I was introduced 
 to a young man who told me that he had a good 
 horse. As I was going to return to Paris by the stage 
 the next morning, it was arranged that he should meet 
 me with the horse at a certain point on the road. 
 
 The next morning at seven the stage started the 
 day very sunshiny, and the air fresh and balmy. 
 (By the way, how easy it is to get up early if other 
 people do, and what an amount of freshness there is 
 in bright sunlight, the fragrant air, and the long 
 shadows! Thus half past six is the common hour 
 for breakfast at taverns in Kentucky, and a man 
 who has had this meal in New York at eight or nine 
 will find himself in Kentucky coming down at 6.30 
 and complaining that breakfast is late; it takes less 
 than a week to effect this transformation.) On this 
 morning I was the only occupant of the stage. On 
 the way I met children going to school, the boys and 
 girls often riding the Shetland ponies which in these 
 parts are kept to carry the children to school. They 
 appeared a singularly thriving, healthy, and happy 
 young population. At the bottom of a little green 
 glade I met a boy on one of these ponies, with his 
 slate and books swung over his shoulder by a strap 
 a very sturdy figure of a boy. With his ruddy and 
 jolly countenance, I thought he could give points to 
 the "shining morning face" of the poet which we all
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 225 
 
 remember. That boy crept "unwillingly " to school; 
 but this one forged ahead on his vigorous little 
 climber of hills as if he were eager to get there and 
 was expecting a lot of fun, greeting me as he passed 
 with a shout of irrepressible joviality. The driver 
 presently stopped at a cross-roads, saying, "Here's 
 where Mr. Jones was to meet you with his horse." 
 Just at that moment there appeared on the brow of 
 the hill, fifty yards away, what seemed to me the 
 most beautiful horse I had ever seen. The rider was 
 trying to get him past a pile of stones, and the ani 
 mated attitude of the horse, as he appeared on the 
 crest of the hill, showed off his figure to advantage. 
 He was in a moment by the side of the stage, and 
 grew finer the more he was looked at. If he had a 
 fault it was in the color, which was a strawberry 
 roan; and yet this rather florid and decorative hue 
 seemed to suit the animal's splendor of form. You 
 saw at once a fine eye, a mettlesome attitude, very 
 high-strung and sensitive nerves, and a look of in 
 vincible hauteur, which impressed you with a sense 
 that it was an indignity to bridle and saddle such a 
 creature. He was about the right height and weight. 
 The graceful form was associated with plenty of 
 strength and substance very round and smooth, 
 but without the extreme Kentucky softness. When 
 he moved I thought him still more beautiful, his 
 action was so stately and splendid no educated 
 action, but the real thing. He had luckily been 
 taught no Kentucky gaits. I got on him and put 
 him into a slow trot, when my delight was greater 
 than ever. His step was very square and deliberate, 
 and he moved with a pomp and dignity which had a 
 most lively effect upon the mind. The beautiful
 
 226 A Virginian Village 
 
 head I saw before me and its spirited carriage were 
 no doubt part of the effect. This horse was after 
 wards brought to New York and took a prize at the 
 Horse Show. When I saw him there he had changed 
 somewhat in outline, as will sometimes happen at 
 his age (he was four when I saw him in Kentucky). 
 He was still fine, of course, but had lost something of 
 the sumptuous fulness which he had when I first 
 looked at him. That may have been because he was 
 not in his finest form. Then it should be said that 
 I did not see him in New York with the accompani 
 ments of early morning balm and sunlight and the 
 first awakening of the shrubbery in the springtime 
 conditions which will have their influence upon the 
 most sober judgment. He fetched a great price, and 
 the purchaser cut off his tail. I have not time now 
 to speak of the subject of long and short tails; but 
 it will be admitted, even by those who dock cobs 
 and hackneys, that the horse of poetry such a 
 horse as this, for instance, which, it seemed to me, 
 might have been some Thessalian courser of the 
 Vale of Tempe should not have a docked tail. 
 
 There are certain horses in Kentucky that are as 
 well known to the community as the public men of 
 the State. The qualities of a bay horse in Versailles, 
 of which I saw a good deal, were known far and wide. 
 When they speak in Kentucky of the "qualities" 
 of a horse, they mean good temper, kindness, and the 
 like. This horse had had the advantage of a good 
 education. There is a grocer in that pretty little 
 town who has great skill in training horses, who 
 makes a very careful selection of the horses he is to 
 educate, has never more than two at a time, and on 
 these bestows an infinity of pains. These horses he
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 227 
 
 succeeds in making very human. The first thing I 
 heard of the little bay that attracted me was that he 
 would come upstairs and look out of the window. 
 This horse had four white stockings up to his knees, 
 which will prejudice him with some persons; but 
 these stockings added an inch to his apparent height, 
 and his spirited carriage of the head gave him another 
 inch. He had been taught all the gaits; but this 
 had been done without in the least spoiling the 
 squareness of his trot. I sent him to a friend in New 
 York. In the trot his feet strike the ground in per 
 fect time and with steps like clockwork; his move 
 ment is like the throbbing of a rich and strong heart; 
 as you rise and fall it warms the blood with a delight 
 ful glow. You really share his youth and life. There 
 is, indeed, when you are mounted upon a horse that 
 has vitality and heat enough for himself and you too, 
 a kind of transfusion of blood a truth which has 
 perhaps afforded the basis for the beautiful idea of 
 the centaur. This bay came from Woodford County, 
 of which Versailles is the county-seat, and which is a 
 home of good horses. Perhaps no part of the State 
 has the characteristic Kentucky charms and beauties 
 to quite the same degree as Woodford County. At 
 a delightful house near Versailles where I stayed my 
 hostess told me that Henry Clay used often to visit 
 them, and that he used to say that if the blue-grass 
 region of Kentucky was the garden spot of the 
 world, Woodford County was the asparagus-bed of 
 this garden. So when later I met a young lady in 
 Lexington and asked her where she was from and she 
 answered: "I'm from the asparagus-bed," I knew 
 what she meant. 
 A word may be said upon the color of Kentucky
 
 228 A Virginian Village 
 
 horses. The eye is much impressed with the preva 
 lence of bay in that region. There has been a good 
 deal of breeding for it. I think there is too much 
 bay; in time one gets rather tired of it. But you will 
 see now and then, on some animal otherwise very 
 fine, a shade of bay which strikes you as not at all 
 the same thing as the tame hue so common in the 
 country a solid mass of deep and glorious red, worn 
 usually by some large animal that can show a lot of 
 it. You say, "This is not a bay horse; I never saw 
 this before." The animal is best seen in the stable- 
 yard on a spring morning, when the sun with his 
 creative heat has warmed him and the stable-boys 
 and the fleas into new life. And he should be un 
 dipped. The long fresh coat of a deep wine-color 
 then looks like some rich fur. There are a good 
 many black horses. Black, they say, is not a color 
 at all. That may be the view of science, but it is 
 not the testimony of the eye. To the eye no bay 
 horse is so red nor white horse so white as a black 
 horse is black. This is particularly so if you get him 
 of that dull charcoal, so rich and sooty, from which 
 every reflection or suggestion of light has been lost, 
 and which is indeed the color of primeval blackness. 
 The various shades of chestnut exist there in about 
 the same proportions as elsewhere. But of gray, on 
 the other hand, a color which I may be allowed to 
 say I am fond of, you see perhaps less in Kentucky 
 than elsewhere. An effort has been made by breeders 
 to avoid it. I was told some curious things about 
 gray horses by Major T , an old gentleman who is 
 one of the first breeders of thoroughbreds in the 
 State. He thinks the time is coming when there will 
 be no more gray horses left in the world. He says
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 229 
 
 that you can get a bay, black, or chestnut from par 
 ents of any color, but that a gray colt must always 
 have a gray sire or dam. He argues that it follows 
 that gray, once lost, could never be regained. It is 
 true, I believe, that among thoroughbreds gray has 
 been nearly bred out. The major's forecast impressed 
 me as a sad one. 
 
 Both the bay and the strawberry roan were in 
 part trotting-bred horses. I may here say that there 
 is more beauty than formerly among Kentucky 
 trotters and more variety. You see trotters of all 
 kinds. There are trotters of a very thoroughbred 
 look. There are also, as offshoots of this stock, 
 varieties of a kind you do not expect to find in Ken 
 tucky. I saw, for instance, in Lexington, an admira 
 ble pattern of a hunter. Being a few weeks after 
 wards in the southern part of the State, I chanced 
 to meet the people who had raised him, and they 
 told me that he was of nearly pure trotting blood. 
 There are other unexpected types to be met with. 
 You do not, for instance, expect to find cobs in Ken 
 tucky; but as good patterns of these scarce animals 
 are to be found there as anywhere, although of course 
 there are not so many of them as there are in Canada 
 and the West. And when you do find a cob in Ken 
 tucky, you are apt to find along with him that speed 
 and "get-away" which is a Kentucky virtue, and 
 which is so hard to find in animals of this class, and 
 without which no perfection of shape is of much 
 account. The Kentucky cobs are mostly of trotting 
 blood. It is from these varieties of the improved 
 trotter that many of the best Kentucky saddle-horses 
 come, and trotting blood enters largely into nearly 
 all of them.
 
 230 A Virginian Village 
 
 One great advantage of this infusion of trotting 
 blood is that it gives manners and sweetness of 
 temper, that most necessary of all qualities in a 
 saddle-horse. There is no doubt of the superior 
 docility and companionability of the trotter. One 
 chief reason for this is, I suppose, that trotters are 
 more handled than other horses. It is association 
 with man that gives a horse that humanized expres 
 sion, such as a good dog has; and for this reason you 
 are especially apt to find it in trotters. There are 
 certain characteristics, I may add, which the human 
 horses are apt to have. A horse with this sort of dis 
 position, I have observed, is likely to show in his face 
 an expression of melancholy; and in high-bred horses 
 this expression becomes very refined. I think you 
 will also feel, when you come to know such a horse 
 well, that his mind is very transparent, is less opaque 
 than that of other horses. 
 
 Perhaps I cannot better illustrate what has been 
 said about recent tendencies and results in breeding 
 horses in Kentucky than by a reference to Lou Chief, 
 in recent years perhaps the most celebrated Kentucky 
 horse of her class. She is of mixed saddle and trotting 
 blood, her sire being Harrison Chief, and her dam a 
 Denmark horse. She does all the gaits perfectly. 
 She will rack in one direction, and will turn round and 
 trot in the other as square as can be. She has trotted 
 in 2.36. She has a fine and high action. I have seen 
 her in the Kentucky pasture, stepping round the 
 meadow with a grand, elastic movement, head up 
 and mane waving to the wind. As is usual with the 
 modern Kentucky animal, she is a combination horse, 
 and is as fine in harness as under the saddle. She is 
 a very interesting horse to drive. The driver has this
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 23 1 
 
 advantage over the rider: if he does not feel the 
 horse as much, he sees him more. If you are not in 
 the mood for the saddle, or do not feel strong enough 
 for it, if you are in a state of mind receptive rather 
 than active, it is a real pleasure, of the passive kind, 
 to hold the reins behind such a horse as Lou Chief 
 to mark the fine action and the abundant power of 
 the animal, to sit with your eye riveted upon the wide 
 flat loin, which, with its calm strength, is the image 
 of all that you at such a moment feel yourself not to 
 be. Lou Chief has inherited from her sire that 
 measured movement, like clockwork, which belongs 
 to our trotters the quarters carried steadily, the 
 stroke of the hind feet telling off spaces of even 
 length with a mechanical regularity which suggests 
 that this sustained action need not come to an end 
 at all. Lou Chief took the first prize in her class at 
 the New York Horse Show. She had before this 
 brought $2500 in Kentucky, notwithstanding the 
 fact that she has a Roman nose and scarcely a first- 
 rate tail a good price for a horse to fetch without 
 regard to pedigree or record, but simply on what she 
 could look and "do" to use this little verb in its 
 peculiar Kentucky signification. I say she has not 
 a first-rate tail. Her tail has been nicked, and al 
 though you may get the right kind of an arch by that 
 treatment, a nicked tail has never, I think, quite 
 that aerial grace to be noticed in such a miracle of 
 nature's architecture as the tail of the incomparable 
 roan gelding before mentioned. The tail, however, 
 has since been taken off. That she should have 
 fetched such a price in spite of these disadvantages 
 shows that a fine horse is still a valuable piece of 
 property. It takes but little acquaintance with the
 
 232 A Virginian Village 
 
 regions in which horses are bred to convince one that 
 this is so. From my travels in Kentucky, Virginia, 
 Canada, and other horse-growing countries, I am well 
 aware that it is much more difficult to find good 
 horses than it is to get purchasers for them after 
 they have been found. 
 
 But there is a great deal in this country besides 
 the horses. There is no country that I know that has 
 more marked and special characteristics than Ken 
 tucky. This is certainly true of scenery. The local 
 literary men speak of it as "fat," a word that is 
 perfectly accurate; I have never seen a country that 
 gave such an impression of fatness. The groves, 
 bare of undergrowth, standing here and there in the 
 broad landscapes are noble and stately, and the 
 spacious pastures of the open country have a fertile 
 and propitious look to be seen scarcely anywhere 
 else. In the early spring the black trunks of the 
 leafless trees, standing here and there in the undulat 
 ing meadows, look like truffles stuck into the bosom 
 of a pudding. And when, towards the end of June, 
 the stain upon the blue-grass is deepest and the 
 grain fields shine with a brighter and paler verdure, 
 how glad is the thank offering of the earth's first 
 fruits lifted at noonday to the blue sky, in which 
 there hangs, piled high and perfectly motionless, one 
 white cumulus cloud. 
 
 I have said enough about the horses. The men 
 and women share the size and bone which the blue- 
 grass and limestone give the horses, and they have 
 the good looks which an outdoor life confers. There 
 was old Bayless, of Bourbon, a powerful figure of a 
 man; what a chest and shoulders he had, and what 
 rugged health and what sense and humor and what
 
 Types of Kentucky Saddle-Horses 233 
 
 an expression of mingled kindness and shrewdness 
 there was in the strongly marked features. And 
 there was young Clay, also of Bourbon, his cheek 
 covered with the light down of early manhood and 
 colored with the mixed blue and red of daily contact 
 with the open air the natural result of a life with 
 horses this hue now and then heightened with a 
 sensitive shyness and with the unconscious dignity 
 of a gentleman. These men seemed to me worthy 
 descendants of the heroes of the "dark and bloody 
 ground." It was significant and natural, by the way, 
 that the Indians should have made a fight for this 
 fine country, such as they perhaps made for no other.
 
 TEXAN SCENERY 
 
 ON the cold spring morning on which, years 
 ago, I started by stage from Abilene to San 
 Angelo, it had been raining all night. One of the 
 fierce storms peculiar to those latitudes had at 
 tacked the country, and left it in a damaged con 
 dition. A chill and mournful wind, which fortunately 
 was on our backs and not in our faces, was blowing 
 from the north. The stage had a high seat outside 
 for the driver, which on this occasion I did not ven 
 ture to share with him. Inside it was a kind of 
 covered carryall, with two seats facing each other, 
 and had, for curtains, flaps which could be rolled up 
 in good weather, but were of course now down. I 
 was the only occupant, although I should rather have 
 liked a passenger or two, my sense of the loneliness 
 of the journey being increased by the fact that the 
 stage had been robbed some seven times within the 
 past two months. I half rolled up one of the blinds 
 so that I could see out. The journey got more and 
 more monotonous as the stage advanced. The cold 
 wind that blew from the north was monotonous, as 
 was the leaden sky which everywhere overhung the 
 vast landscape. The country was slightly rolling, 
 and I think you get an impression of greater vastness 
 from a slightly rolling than from a perfectly flat 
 country. The wide tops of the knolls, to which the 
 immense pastures ascend with a slight swell and a 
 long, resistless sweep like that of the sea, are points 
 by which to measure the country. The few horses
 
 Texan Scenery 235 
 
 and cattle which you see grazing far and near (the 
 distant ones, for some reason, appear to be of unusual 
 height) serve the same purpose. The characteristics 
 of the scenery are monotonous. You pass wide 
 spaces in which there is scarcely anything but grass 
 and cactus. The only tree is the mesquite which is, 
 to speak roughly, about as big as a large peach-tree. 
 You pass miles and miles of these, every sixth or 
 seventh tree containing among its branches a dark- 
 green sphere of mistletoe about a foot in diameter. 
 The pastures, filled with the mesquite-trees, look not 
 unlike peach-orchards. The country thus has an 
 appearance of cultivation, and this fact, taken to 
 gether with your knowledge that it lies just as it has 
 done for thousands of years, heightens your sense of 
 its aboriginal wildness. 
 
 There is infinite monotony in the profusion of 
 yellow, pink, and blue flowers which underlie the 
 mesquites, and which tinge the prairies to their re 
 motest limits. The odor of these flowers is sweet 
 but powerful, and the monotony of the smell is added 
 to that of the wind and the sky, and the endless 
 flowers, and the other incessantly recurring pecu 
 liarities of the face of nature. The smell soon be 
 comes somewhat nauseating, although it is perhaps 
 rather the constancy of the odor than its potency 
 which affects you. Everything else is equally in 
 cessant. It seems to be the same killdee, with the 
 same cry, which alights upon the same cactus, or 
 by the side of a wet gully or pathway of stones where 
 a stream has been flowing. It is the same scissor- 
 bird which, with the two long feathers of its tail, 
 flutters before you and settles downward with a 
 weak, uncertain movement. But the greatest im-
 
 236 A Virginian Village 
 
 pression of monotony you receive from the prairie- 
 dogs. The towns of these creatures line your road, 
 with very short intervals, all day long. They bark 
 from the edges of their holes in just the same way, 
 and sit erect with just the same tricks of manner, and 
 wiggle their tails in just the same way, communicat 
 ing thereto a shiver of great rapidity, and flop down 
 into their holes at your approach with the same 
 rudeness and abruptness. They did this all the way 
 through Taylor and Runnels counties. These ani 
 mals have a strong effect upon you. You are alone 
 and your mind is in a very susceptible condition. 
 Your imagination has been taken possession of by 
 the wind and sky, and the eternal flower-tinted 
 waste, and the universal and nauseating perfumes. 
 On top of these come the rude and monotonous 
 manners of the prairie-dogs. They are very clannish 
 and exclusive things. They seem to be saying to 
 you that you may be all very well where you come 
 from, but that you have no kind of status in a prairie- 
 dog town, and are not wanted there. You see them 
 a few hundred feet ahead of you, chasing one another 
 about with the familiarity of intimate acquaintance. 
 But you are no sooner caught sight of than each flies 
 to his hole, and sits there upon his hind legs, wig 
 gling his tail, and uttering a bark which seems to 
 say: "Who is this? Something very suspicious, no 
 doubt." And down he flops. This iteration and 
 identity of sentiment and behavior soon begins to 
 tell upon you. These ten hours of incessant ex- 
 clusiveness all about you on both sides of the road, 
 the journeying through I know not how many 
 leagues of insult and suspicion, which, by the way, 
 you must support alone, in time powerfully affect
 
 Texan Scenery 237 
 
 your cheerfulness and self-esteem, and you sink back 
 ward in a profound dejection. 
 
 As the afternoon advanced, the sky grew brighter, 
 and by and by the sun appeared, and I left the in 
 side of the stage, and, for company and a better view, 
 got up with the driver. As you approach the Colo 
 rado River, you pass a great extent of country which 
 is entirely bare of trees. A peculiarity of travel 
 in Texas, by the way, is that there are no roads, only 
 ruts and tracks which have been made in previous 
 trips. To these the driver pays no attention. The 
 road is anywhere he chooses to drive, the four horses, 
 however, always going at a good trot. The solitary 
 vehicle traversed the immense plain like a ship at 
 sea. The scene had now become much more cheer 
 ful, but was still very vast and solemn. We moved 
 for some hours through a region having no other 
 covering than the endless flower-embroidered grasses, 
 much overrun by growths of no greater height than 
 the cactus, and populous with many forms of animal 
 life. At the hour when the day was just approaching 
 its conclusion, an old gray fox, much astonished and 
 discomposed by our advent, ran out of a rut before 
 us, and, going some thirty yards to our right, stood 
 between us and the sun, which just rested on the 
 rim of the horizon, looking at us, having upon his 
 features an expression of wild and dull wonder. The 
 poets have made the fox and the fox's den the sym 
 bol of desolation. As the body of this animal was 
 projected against the red disk of the setting sun, 
 with whose lonely effulgence the vast tinted and per 
 fumed scene was brightened, he looked indeed the 
 type of solitude. 
 
 Texas was unlike what I had expected. I had a
 
 238 A Virginian Village 
 
 notion of a flat plain covered in May with wild 
 flowers; but I had not at all apprehended the realities 
 of the Texan landscape. I did not see the cactus or 
 the interminable mesquites looking like orchards. I 
 knew there were flowers, but I did not see the end 
 less stretches of blue and yellow, or smell the univer 
 sal odors which would be too powerful if they were 
 not so essential to the country and so impossible 
 to escape. There are a good many hills. It is true 
 that there is a great deal of flat country in Texas, 
 but there is also a great deal of rolling and broken 
 country. Then, there is also much pretty scenery. 
 Tom Green and Concho counties are full of charm 
 ing scenery. There are no forests, it is true. Beyond 
 the mesquites which cover the country, there are only 
 the dark-green clumps of live-oaks and pecans scat 
 tered about at wide intervals. 
 
 But the country has its own indigenous beauties. 
 Many of the streams are clear. The Brazos and 
 Trinity are muddy rivers, but the Concho is as clear 
 as a mountain brook. The landscape becomes gay 
 and brilliant, as the afternoon advances and a bold 
 and ample light is shed over it and the profuse 
 grasses are swept by the winds of May. The ver 
 dure with which the late spring enriches the horizon 
 rests upon it like a mirage. This verdure is peculiar. 
 It is of a bright emerald hue, and has a sheen upon 
 it which is like that upon the rind of green fruit, 
 but much stronger. This appearance is very rank, 
 and looks as though it would come off on your hands. 
 Into this the colors of the sunset infuse many fresh 
 and delicate stains. I have never seen a country 
 upon which the sunset has a more softening and 
 transforming effect than it has upon this.
 
 Texan Scenery 239 
 
 These remarks relate only to the earth; you have 
 not as yet looked above you. Owing, perhaps, to 
 the absence of trees or of tall objects of any kind, 
 the sky seems very high and remote. During the 
 day's closing moments the heavens have been pre 
 paring for the reception of the stars, and have taken 
 on a soft, deep bloom like that of purple flowers. 
 No light has yet appeared in those lofty spaces, but 
 while you have not been looking, a star has wan 
 dered hither with timid and hesitating step, and 
 taken its modest station in the spotless and pro 
 foundly purple expanse. Soon a bolder and a larger 
 one, remote from the first, hangs, a yellow spot, 
 above the scene, and contributes its golden infusion 
 to the vast chromatic pageant. Now for some mo 
 ments the face of nature is gentle and pensive. 
 Gilded by his attendant planet, the Concho flows 
 with a perfectly clear current, between ramparts as 
 smooth and sedately verdant as those of the Thames. 
 Faster and faster the stars are projected from their 
 elastic depths, the glint of their fine points at first 
 faint and pale, but strengthening with approaching 
 darkness. Now go within doors for an hour, and re 
 turn, and you are astonished at the thick array of 
 bright objects that crowd and jostle each other in 
 the wide domain on high. You look upward, and be 
 hold them where they glow with ever-increasing en 
 ergy, and shine with simple and vainglorious magnifi 
 cence, and silently triumph with an ostentation and 
 a splendor of self-assertion unknown elsewhere. The 
 stars occupy a larger place in the mind of the young 
 Texan than in yours or mine. He views nightly 
 the exalted throng, and remembers that the same 
 glittering roof covers himself and distant friends.
 
 240 A Virginian Village 
 
 From the day of your arrival in Texas until you 
 leave, you are very close to nature. You have had 
 a good night's rest, and have got rid of the motion 
 of the cars, when a journey is proposed to a ranch 
 fifteen miles away. The object of the expedition is 
 a business one, but nevertheless guns are put in the 
 wagon, in the certainty of plenty of shooting. The 
 Texan does not ride when he can drive, and they all 
 get into a covered wagon. You yourself, however, 
 if you prefer it, are given a saddle-pony. It is one 
 of the earliest of the really warm days of the season, 
 and the spring is in full tide. The sun is strong, 
 but there is wonderful life and freshness in the air. 
 After an hour or two the backs of your hands begin 
 to blacken. You have your first elate sense that 
 you have really found the wilderness, when a hawk 
 not the bird known to us in the East, but a bulky 
 creature rises from her nest on a near mesquite, and 
 urges her level flight along the ground with a heavy 
 motion of the wing. Presently a long-legged and 
 long-eared animal goes springing by, which at first 
 you do not know what to make of, but which you 
 discover to be the jack-rabbit. Somebody shoots, 
 and it turns several somersaults, and lies upon its 
 side, its large pop-eye expressing the acutest pain, 
 and its body struggling and bleeding copiously, like 
 some wild, coarse weed which has been cut asunder 
 and from which the red sap is flowing. The white 
 tufts of little cottontails are flashing in every direc 
 tion, and flocks of plovers settle all about you. You 
 are surprised at the amount of live things there are 
 everywhere. Animal life exists on these prairies 
 with an almost metropolitan profusion. The prairie 
 is the city of the jack-rabbit.
 
 Texan Scenery 241 
 
 Old soldiers who went through Texas to Mexico 
 fifty years ago, at the time of the war, have told me 
 how great this profusion was then. The antelope 
 even, unused to men, and expecting no harm, would 
 not run from them. There is not now, of course, the 
 quantity of wild life there was at that time. But 
 there is a great deal left, and the animals of civilized 
 communities, cattle, sheep, and horses, are every 
 where. The Texan bull is perhaps the most digni 
 fied occupant of the prairie. He does not turn and 
 run as you approach, as the steers, calves, and cows 
 do, but stands there, knee-deep in the long grass 
 that borders the watercourses, composed and un- 
 regardful of you; authority and majestic tyranny 
 graven deeply in the wrinkles of his grand head. 
 There is a sad fate in reserve for this fine creature. 
 When he is old and feeble, the young bulls will get 
 round him and gore him to death. That struggle 
 for existence which with human beings is softened, 
 in appearance at least, he must encounter in its 
 simple and original form. There are, in his case, 
 none of those ineffectual but well-intended conso 
 lations which the young address to the old: "Cheer 
 up, my dear fellow; you're in the heyday of your 
 youth and beauty." It is not thus the young bulls 
 comport themselves to the old one. He sees round 
 him in a circle their utterly candid and hateful faces, 
 as, with a cry of anguish, rage, and broken pride, he 
 sinks amid the solitude of the prairie. 
 
 On the morning of the round-up, everybody was 
 in the saddle by five o'clock, and the bunches of 
 cattle were soon in motion. The proprietor and half 
 a dozen boys rode in the rear and on the sides. I 
 was allowed to try my skill in an occasional chase
 
 242 A Virginian Village 
 
 after a stray calf. But the scene was so charming 
 that one did not need this excitement. The morning 
 air of that mountain plain of western Texas is fresh 
 and sweet. The country is here a table-land three 
 thousand feet above the sea. We soon encountered 
 many other herds, which were on their way to the 
 common centre, where each ranchman of the neigh 
 borhood was to "cut out," or select, his own cattle 
 by the brand. Before long, in all directions, cattle 
 appeared. They were moving, under a sky of per 
 fect blue, through a boundless plain of bright ver 
 dure, variegated by the narrow lines of the darker 
 timber which marked the concealed watercourses, 
 their speckled backs, as far as the eye could reach, 
 red, white, black, and brown, shining in the sun. 
 The herds, not in thick masses, but loose and scat 
 tered, were swept onward in a wide and gaily colored 
 stream. What a brilliant, flashing scene! It looked 
 as if it were nature's holiday, and all the animal life 
 of that part of the world were hurrying to some great 
 fair. 
 
 If the impression which I have given here of the 
 country may seem somewhat rose-colored, I should 
 explain that I was there at what is everywhere the 
 most beautiful time of the year late spring and 
 early summer. I remained, however, long enough 
 to know what Texas heat is like. In June it be 
 came too hot to be much out in the open country; 
 but I found amusement and occupation in the neigh 
 borhood of the ranch-house. A ranch-house is one 
 of the best places I ever found for reading. There 
 was a shelf of books. Among the books there were 
 the works of Dr. Johnson and Lord Chesterfield, 
 and, somewhat oddly, it seemed to me, Miss Emma
 
 Texan Scenery 243 
 
 Lazarus's translations from Heine. Miss Lazarus's 
 translations struck me as among the best of any kind 
 I had ever read. They render the wayward elo 
 quence of the poet with great beauty and the closest 
 sympathy. The gift of making translations such 
 as hers is rarer than that of writing good original 
 verse, and perhaps of more value to the world. Her 
 own verse was full of thought and feeling. But 
 Miss Lazarus had a combination of feminine sym 
 pathy with a sure intellectual and critical discrimina 
 tion which especially fitted her for the delineation 
 of great literary minds. Had she lived, and chosen 
 to exercise her almost unsurpassed genius in this 
 direction, it is my belief that she would have placed 
 the English-speaking world under great and lasting 
 obligations. The volume brought also to my mind 
 a fresh sense of the wide void left when we missed 
 from among us so rare and kind a spirit. It was 
 great good fortune to find among these books "Ras- 
 selas" and "The Lives of the Poets" and "Lord 
 Chesterfield's Letters to his Son." I think I never 
 so well appreciated the weighty thought and senti 
 ment of the author of "Rasselas," or the sincerity 
 and acuteness of Chesterfield's masterpiece. I read 
 that profoundly sympathetic work, the "Life of 
 Savage," and at a distance of a hundred years, and 
 amid the quiet of the Texan pastures, could hear 
 the large heart of Johnson beating like some engine 
 which shakes with its pulsations the tenement in 
 which it is housed. 
 
 When I tired of reading, I could watch the educa 
 tion of four young mocking-birds, packed like sar 
 dines in a nest, on the lowest branch of a mesquite, a 
 rod or two from the kitchen door, to the great con-
 
 244 A Virginian Village 
 
 cern of the mother, who was fluttering and crying 
 about my ears. Or I would take a line, and bob in 
 the stream for what they call in Texas trout, which 
 are really bass, or for catfish. The source of this 
 stream was a big spring near at hand, in which I 
 took great delight. This was in what is called a 
 motte. A motte is a striking peculiarity of Texan 
 scenery. It is a clump of good-sized forest-trees, 
 usually either live-oaks or pecans. In a region as 
 bare of forests as Texas, a motte is a most grateful 
 object, and one conspicuous throughout a great ex 
 tent of country. The spring I speak of runs out 
 freely from under a rock in a good mass, say six feet 
 wide and two or three feet deep, protected by a thick 
 clump of lofty pecans. The bottom is smooth and 
 bright, and the water, which is perfectly clear and 
 fresh, comes out from the bosom of the rock with a 
 slant impulse, which does not change or weaken 
 throughout the day, while far and wide upon the 
 whole extent of the landscape without the sun's heat 
 descends with the force of a hammer. Throughout 
 the summer months the proprietor takes his bath 
 here at sunrise. There could not be a more delight 
 ful one, but the bather must not mind feeling now 
 and then against him the athletic stroke of the bass 
 or the gar as he rushes from the shadow of the cavern 
 into the sunlight. 
 
 Early in June I had an opportunity of seeing what 
 was perhaps the most extraordinary spectacle I saw 
 in that country a Texas thunder-cloud. They have 
 in Texas what gives every promise of being a far 
 more dreadful thunder-storm and rain-storm than 
 one would ever see in the East. This, however, has 
 no result in the form of rain, and is accompanied by
 
 Texan Scenery 245 
 
 very little noise. But evening after evening, toward 
 sun-down, the cloud would nevertheless appear at 
 about the same point of the horizon, and would re 
 main on exhibition for an hour or so, while I watched 
 it from a seat on the fence inclosing the kitchen yard, 
 as if from a chair in the dress-circle. This cloud is 
 a structure of great volume, and reaching to an im 
 mense height, which unfolds and is rolled and piled 
 upward slowly, but with such facility of progress 
 that you think the whole heavens are about to be 
 seized upon. The edifice stands in front of you, 
 from its base to its rolling turret pierced with fine 
 needles of lightning, the dark mass filled throughout 
 with electricity which seems hung upon a hair-trigger. 
 The earth is in shadow, and the wind blows mystic 
 ally. It is very terrific, and you wonder what it is 
 going to do to you, and the birds of the air, and the 
 beasts of the field. It does nothing, however; but 
 from its depths sketches upon the fume of its purple 
 surface hieroglyphic after hieroglyphic of the utmost 
 elaboration and perfection, drawn with a pencil of 
 infinite fineness, strength, and distinctness.
 
 LINCOLN AND STANTON 
 
 I AM indebted to a friend, who was not one of 
 Lincoln's admirers, for the following: 
 When the last call for troops was made and a 
 conscription ordered, the proportion assigned to 
 the city of New York was some thousands in 
 excess of what some people believed to be our 
 legal liability, and our committee on volunteering 
 were certain they could prove this, if they could have 
 access to the books of the War Department. The 
 Committee: Orison Blunt, John Fox, Smith Ely, 
 and William M. Tweed went to Washington and 
 asked Secretary Stanton's permission to examine the 
 records, which was brusquely refused on the pretext 
 that the books were in constant use. The Committee 
 then went to the White House and saw Lincoln in 
 his private office. After asking them to be seated, 
 he resumed his chair in which he sat partly on his 
 back, with his heels literally on the mantle-piece. 
 His linen bosom was unbuttoned, exposing his red 
 flannel shirt. He was told that we had furnished, in 
 excess of previous calls, more than enough to exempt 
 us from the present call, which we would prove, if 
 we could have access to the records for any two hours 
 during the night, when they were not in use. He 
 was also assured that in no event would a conscrip 
 tion be needed in New York, as we were getting 
 fifty volunteers daily, and a short postponement of 
 the draft would enable us to supply all the demands, 
 just or unjust. He listened with an expression of
 
 Lincoln and Stanton 247 
 
 profound sadness, and said he thought the request 
 a reasonable one, but he feared, if the order for a 
 draft was postponed, volunteering would cease. 
 He said a similar committee from Cincinnati had 
 applied to him for a postponement of the draft, as 
 they were getting twenty volunteers a day. It was 
 done, and the day following not a single volunteer 
 appeared. "That," said Lincoln, "is human nature. 
 When you think death is after you, you run, but as 
 soon as death stops, you stop." At this he sprang 
 from his chair, throwing his arms about, and laughed 
 loudly at his own dismal joke. 
 
 Lincoln gave the New York Committee a note to 
 Stanton, substantially as follows: 
 
 Dear Secretary: These gentlemen from New York 
 ask only what I think is right. They wish access to 
 the records, with two accountants for two hours at 
 any time to-night. I have told them that they may 
 have double that time. Yours, 
 
 A. LINCOLN. 
 
 They took the note to Stanton, who handed it to 
 Frye. The latter glanced at it and, saying, " Take 
 seats," left the office. In a few minutes he returned 
 and said curtly, "The order is annulled; you can't 
 see the books." The Committee withdrew and re 
 turned to New York the next forenoon. The clerk 
 of the Committee, Eugene Durbin, said that late 
 in the evening an army officer with two orderlies 
 called at the Committee's rooms and presented the 
 chairman with a note, which read as follows: "The 
 Secretary of War expects to be informed that the 
 Committee on Volunteering from the County of 
 New York have left Washington prior to noon to-
 
 248 A Virginian Village 
 
 morrow." The Committee after their return said 
 it was Stanton and not Lincoln, who was President 
 of the United States. 
 
 The gentleman to whom I am indebted for this, 
 the late Mr. Smith Ely, a former mayor of New York 
 and member of Congress, was a democratic political 
 leader of war times and, although one of the most 
 amiable and kind-hearted of men, had of course 
 to some degree the feelings regarding Lincoln shared 
 by the men who in those days frequented the Man 
 hattan Club. He does not see much point in Lin 
 coln's remark about death and the draft. To me 
 the point seems clear enough. "When the Devil 
 was sick, the Devil a saint would be," etc. Nor will 
 the reader conclude with the Committee that Stan- 
 ton was President and not Lincoln. Stanton was a 
 man of great administrative ability, a kind of human 
 dynamo, such as you could hardly duplicate in the 
 country, a patriot and honest man besides. He was al 
 most indispensable and had to be got on with. As long 
 as the issue was one of no great importance (which 
 seems to have been the case in this instance) Lin 
 coln let him have his way. Stanton was a kind of 
 official bouncer for the Government, and it is possi 
 ble that the astute Lincoln appreciated the comfort 
 of having work of this kind taken off his hands. I 
 must say that his action in this case does not appear 
 unreasonable. It surely would not have done to 
 have every town in the country, upon which a req 
 uisition was made for troops, pulling over the records 
 of the War Department. And if New York, why not 
 any other place? 
 
 Stanton was probably the greatest man in civil 
 life produced by the war, of course, after Lincoln.
 
 Lincoln and Stanton 249 
 
 My earliest recollection of him is seeing him at the 
 trial of Sickles for the murder of Key, which took 
 place when I was a boy at school in Washington. 
 He was one of Sickles' counsel. The acquaintance 
 which Sickles formed at that time with Stanton was 
 in part the cause of Sickles' success as a soldier in 
 the Civil War. Stanton advanced and supported 
 him. I remember at the trial a thick set man with 
 a heavy beard, who sat behind the other lawyers, and 
 who would occasionally interpolate a remark in a 
 gruff voice. He had that physical build which is 
 said to be one of the best for strength, very broad 
 shoulders and deep chest, a large body set on short, 
 stout legs. He had Herculean powers of labor. I have 
 spoken of him as "honest." I suppose he was hon 
 est, although there were those who said that he was 
 not. I do not suppose that he was an overscrupulous 
 man. He would have been out of place as war min 
 ister if he had been. When someone complained to 
 him about General Meigs, who was one of his sub 
 ordinates, he said: "Now don't say anything against 
 Meigs; he's the best man I have; he is a soldier, and 
 can do things, which I, as a lawyer, find it hard to 
 do." One wonders what the things were that Stan- 
 ton wouldn't do. 
 
 I am able to make only one original contribution 
 to the history of Stanton. A young girl once told 
 me this incident about him. The reader of course 
 knows Coleridge's poem beginning: 
 
 All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 
 Are but the ministers of love, 
 And feed his sacred flame.
 
 250 A Virginian Village 
 
 Her father was a client and a great friend of Stan- 
 ton's and she used to make long visits to Stanton's 
 family during the Civil War. She was a pretty girl 
 and a belle of those days. She said that Stanton 
 worked all the time and that the only relaxation he 
 allowed himself was that on Sunday afternoon for 
 an hour or so he would read poetry to her, and she 
 told me that the poem he read oftenest and with the 
 greatest pleasure was "All thoughts, all passions, 
 all delights."
 
 WASHINGTON AND LINCOLN 
 
 WE are fortunate to have had in our short 
 career two such characters as Washington 
 and Lincoln. England has had only one, Alfred. 
 Washington was, of course, a man of much less 
 salient characteristics than Lincoln. The young 
 Chastaleux found his distinction to be in " the harmo 
 nious blending of his characteristics rather than in 
 the existence of marked special qualities." So Wash 
 ington has always seemed to his countrymen, but 
 he probably had more pronounced qualities than we 
 have supposed. For instance, it is doubtful whether 
 the sugar and water expression in the Gilbert Stuart 
 picture was true. His habitual look was, I am sure, 
 sterner than that. Latrobe thought he looked stern, 
 and the pencil sketch he made of him looks so. Al 
 bert Gallatin said that "of all the inaccessible people 
 he ever knew, Washington was the most inaccessible." 
 Gallatin, however, knew him as a young man. That 
 could not have been the opinion of the farmer Burns, 
 a neighbor of Washington, who once said to him, 
 "Where would you have been, if the widow Custis 
 hadn't married you?" 
 
 There grew up an idea that Washington was 
 colorless. Carlyle, for instance, said of him that 
 "George was just Oliver with the juice left out." 
 That is, of course, untrue. He is not so visible as 
 Lincoln, has not Lincoln's gift of familiarity. In 
 order to get a clear idea of him, we should have to 
 follow him more closely than it would be necessary
 
 252 A Virginian Village 
 
 to do with Lincoln. But as we did so, we should, 
 of course, find him a man of marked qualities. I 
 have always found that men are more individual 
 than they are thought to be. As you look at them 
 closely, marked traits begin to define themselves. 
 It would be so in the case of this great man. I am 
 sure also, that as we followed him closely, we should 
 grow very fond of him. We should perhaps find 
 him pleasanter company than Lincoln. For one 
 thing he was handsome; he had a person worthy to 
 be the tenement of a mind and character as great 
 as his. I daresay he was not unaware of this. He 
 seems to have had a natural allowance of vanity, 
 which is a cheerful quality. Of that quality Lincoln 
 does not seem to have had a bit. He would have 
 been the happier for a little of it. Washington** 
 however, had not at all a great opinion of himself. 
 He does not seem to have set even a fair estimate 
 upon his own powers. Says one who has made a 
 study of him: "There seems to be no doubt that to 
 the day of his death he was the most determined 
 sceptic as to his fitness for the positions to which he 
 was called in succession." That we know was not 
 Lincoln's feeling. Lincoln probably knew perfectly 
 well what he was. 
 
 He had not in the least Lincoln's humor. One of 
 his foibles, by the way, was a disposition to shine 
 as a wit, a disposition which was a source of disturb 
 ance to his admirers, some of whom had come over 
 seas to set eyes upon the most illustrious man of his 
 age. His worshipping contemporaries heartily wished 
 he would curb this propensity. But you and I will 
 find this and his other foibles pleasant, because they 
 bring him nearer to us.
 
 Washington and Lincoln 253 
 
 He was himself of a happy disposition. He appre 
 ciated the good things of this world. He was a mun 
 dane person, and there is something cheerful in that. 
 Thackeray hinted that in his marriage he was not 
 insensible to the fact that the widow Custis had a 
 hundred thousand dollars, a great sum in those days. 
 People here were indignant at the suggestion when 
 it was made. I am indignant myself, and yet the 
 promptitude with which his heart declared itself 
 when he saw the widow, taken in connection with 
 the fact that the other lady for whom he entertained 
 a tender sentiment, Miss Phillipse, was also an heir 
 ess, does look as if he had his wits about him. But 
 why object to this? It was in character. Why 
 object to what is in character, and why hesitate to 
 recognize it? 
 
 The time was also cheerful; at any rate it looks so 
 from this distance. It has the pleasantness which 
 belongs to the beginnings of things, to youth and 
 spring. The sun has risen upon our virgin shores and 
 shines upon the little community lying between the 
 slopes of the Alleghenies and the white coast line. 
 Behind, all the way to the Pacific, is the vast wilder 
 ness to be filled one day with a mighty state. Above 
 this scene there appears in the sky the countenance 
 and figure of the hero. How beautiful across the wide 
 Atlantic that figure must have seemed to minds 
 filled with the ideas of the time of human perfectibil 
 ity. Contrast the peace, the dignity, the triumph 
 of temperate reason that sits upon those classic 
 features and those reverend locks with the orgies 
 enacted in France. With what serenity that counte 
 nance invites the world to the true ways of freedom. 
 You would think that there were to be no more
 
 254 A Virginian Village 
 
 wars or rumors of wars; no more selfish passions; no 
 political strife between sections, or social strife be 
 tween classes. You would almost think that the 
 ills incident to flesh and blood are about to disappear. 
 
 Both Washington and Lincoln are men from the 
 farm and the country; both are physically strong 
 men. Washington was six feet three. Lafayette 
 said of him that his hands were the largest he ever 
 saw. He was a skillful horseman. People said that 
 scarcely anyone had such a grip with his knees as 
 he had. He could ride anything; all that he asked 
 of a horse was that he should go forward. He had a 
 passion for horses, of which the following is an illus 
 tration. Like most men who have accomplished 
 much, he believed there was a right and a wrong 
 way of doing things, and he had a strong feeling that 
 they should be done the right way. A tradition 
 which I have had from a lady connected with Wash 
 ington's family, and which I have not seen in print, 
 is that he would go into the stable and pass a silk 
 handkerchief over the coats of the horses; if he found 
 dust on the handkerchief, the groom would catch it. 
 
 Both Washington and Lincoln were prudent men 
 in money matters. In Washington's case this story 
 may be related as an instance. I have seen several 
 versions of it. The following will do as well as any: 
 Young Mr. Lewis was dining at Mount Vernon. 
 Washington said he was looking for a pair of horses. 
 Someone said that Mr. Lewis had a fine pair. Lewis 
 said, "Yes, I have a good pair, but they will cost 
 something, and General Washington will never pay 
 anything." At that a clock on the mantlepiece 
 struck. It was a cuckoo clock, the gift perhaps of 
 some European admirer. (This story will illustrate
 
 Washington and Lincoln 255 
 
 as well Washington's propensity to make bad jokes.) 
 The cuckoo came out and crowed the hour. Wash 
 ington said: "Ah, Lewis, you're a funny fellow; 
 that bird is laughing at you." That is one of those 
 poor stories, which I prefer to good ones, for the 
 reason that they are more likely to be true. Nobody 
 would have been at the trouble to invent anything 
 of that sort. 
 
 There is one difference between Washington and 
 Lincoln, which is characteristic and important. 
 Washington was an aristocrat, an up-right, down 
 right English gentleman, much resembling the Eng 
 lishmen of the revolution of 1688, which was a 
 Protestant gentlemen's revolution. He was an aristo 
 crat, but with a difference. A fine gentleman of that 
 day would probably have thought him a countryman. 
 I saw lately that Josiah Quincy, who had known him, 
 said that he gave the impression of a man who had 
 not been much in society. I should think that that 
 was true. One has an impression that he was in a 
 noble way a rustic. He was an English country 
 gentleman, but he was much more that that. On 
 this basis there was superposed something of Leather- 
 stocking, and something of Cincinnatus. With his 
 life of the wilderness, and his interests as a patriot 
 leader and protector of the little society to which 
 he belonged against the savage on the one side and 
 the European oppressor on the other, how far was he 
 removed from the limited ideas and narrow experi 
 ence of an eighteenth-century English squire. 
 
 But he was essentially an aristocrat. Read his 
 letters, and you will see that the tone of them is 
 unmistakably aristocratic. He belonged to a world 
 of classes, a world in which the existence of classes
 
 256 A Virginian Village 
 
 was the natural and inevitable order of things. But 
 a new society was about to grow up, and it was right 
 that this society should have its great man. In the 
 older society the feeling of the upper class was one 
 of marked separation from the common people. The 
 feeling of that class was, consciously or unconsciously, 
 that it was the business of the poor to be unhappy. 
 A great man of the old time could not altogether 
 escape this feeling. There had been plenty of good 
 and kind rulers in the past, but their feeling in re 
 gard to the common people could not be the same as 
 if they had themselves been of that class. Lincoln, 
 on the other hand, was of that class. In him we have 
 a great man, unlike the good rulers of the past; 
 not a Haroun Al Raschid, mixing with his people, 
 nor an Alfred burning the cakes, but the real thing. 
 The fact that he was from that class, that he be 
 longed to it not only by birth and experience but by 
 nature (for birth would not have been sufficient, 
 if it had not been that in his heart and in his pro 
 found sympathies he was a democrat to the core), 
 was an important element of his fame. Without it, 
 he could not have the place he now has. 
 
 Of course, it is his power of sympathy that at 
 tracts men. But that would not of itself have been 
 enough. What endears him especially to men is the 
 union of sympathy with faith and great strength. 
 It is very unusual to find these qualities united. In 
 the list of English and American worthies I can think 
 of but one other who was like him in this respect. 
 And you must go to literature to find him. . I mean 
 Dr. Johnson. Scott had this union of qualities, al 
 though in a less degree, and I have sometimes had a 
 fancy, if there be not a certain temerity in the sug-
 
 Washington and Lincoln 257 
 
 gestion, that you might descry some such associa 
 tion of characteristics in the vast and vague per 
 sonality that lies remote and in shadow behind the 
 writings of Shakespeare. But in Lincoln and John 
 son it is clear and marked, and it is the reason of their 
 great power of winning affection. Men wish to 
 attach themselves to such characters. The thought 
 of each man is : "He would have been my friend." 
 
 No great public man has had such strong human 
 intuitions. Certainly no man in our history is his 
 equal in that respect. Take Webster, for instance; 
 I presume that scarcely any of our great men have 
 been his intellectual equals. And he was much be 
 sides an intellect. He was a broad and generous 
 kind of man. No man could have been further re 
 moved from that hard and narrow conceit of the 
 intellectual athlete, who thinks, because his head 
 is a good one, it is adequate to anything, and that 
 there is nothing in Heaven and Earth outside of or 
 beyond his philosophy. He was moreover a poet, 
 witness the many fine things he had to say about the 
 Sun. And he was human, too, what you would call 
 a good fellow. But he had not Lincoln's close human 
 intuitions, his eyes and heart for men and human 
 life. 
 
 It appears from the recent life of John Hay that 
 it took Lincoln's secretaries a year or more to find 
 out that their chief was a great man and that they 
 found it out before other people did. In talking with 
 people who knew Lincoln before the war, nearly all of 
 whom are now gone, it has always been easy for me 
 to see that they thought the modern notion of him 
 extravagant. They may have had some jealousy 
 of him, or may have felt something of pique and
 
 258 A Virginian Village 
 
 vexation that they had not been clever enough to 
 find out all this for themselves, but that was what 
 they thought. Of course they were too prudent to 
 say that, but you could see it in their faces. The 
 devotion of the people of this country to Lincoln is, 
 however, not merely a matter of opinion. He has 
 got hold of their hearts as no other American ever 
 did, not even Washington, and he has held them for 
 fifty years, and there is no indication that this sen 
 timent is on the wane.
 
 LINCOLN AND FORESIGHT 
 
 IT is strange that Lincoln with his thoughtful- 
 ness should not have foreseen in some degree 
 the approach of secession and war. He had been 
 in Congress and must have known the southern 
 people fairly well. He was undoubtedly a foreseeing 
 kind of man. No one saw more clearly than he did 
 that the country could not continue to exist half 
 free and half slave. Indeed he was one of the two 
 or three who were the first to perceive that. It 
 seems strange, therefore, that he had not some no 
 tion of what was coming. But who does foresee what 
 is ahead? Benjamin Franklin was a foreseeing kind 
 of man, I should have thought. He spent a number 
 of years in France before the Revolution, knew the 
 country well and was on intimate terms with the 
 leading people of France. He remained there till 
 1785. In eight years from that time the King's 
 head was off, and yet the wise, observant, thoughtful 
 and presumably far-sighted Franklin seems never in 
 the least to have suspected what was coming. The 
 French Revolution would indeed have been very 
 difficult to foresee, as perhaps our Civil War was in a 
 less degree. But there are other things not so diffi 
 cult to know beforehand, which are not foreseen. 
 I was in the House of Commons one night during the 
 Franco-Prussian War, when Vernon Harcourt, who 
 was at that time unconnected with the government, 
 accused the government of shortsightedness in not 
 foreseeing the war, implying that he had foreseen it.
 
 260 A Virginian Village 
 
 Robert Lowe, an extremely clever man, got up 
 to answer for the government, and said: "Because 
 the gentleman foresaw this war, he thinks that every 
 body else should have been as clever as he was. I 
 am free to say, however, that the whole thing was a 
 complete surprise to me." Perhaps he should have 
 had some notion that it was coming. If the English 
 government had taken the trouble to fish out from 
 the pigeonholes of Foreign Offices, the reports of 
 their diplomatic agents on the continent they might 
 have seen it coming, But they did not; men are 
 always too busy with present matters to bother with 
 what is problematical. How little we believed, for in 
 stance, in the coming of the present war. A half a 
 dozen nations had each been holding for forty years a 
 loaded pistol with the finger on a hair trigger, and yet 
 how surprised we were when in the lapse of time one 
 of the pistols went off. Much had been said about the 
 next "war," but have we not put the prophecies 
 regarding it in much the same catagory as that of 
 the destruction of the world by fire. People scarcely 
 ever make any account of prophecies. In their deep 
 attentive study of human nature, the ancients said 
 that the gods gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy, 
 but coupled the gift with the condition that her 
 prophecies should not be believed. Is that not so of 
 all prophets? They are usually regarded as bores 
 or cranks. The heedlessness and incuriousness 
 about the future which men show regarding public 
 matters, and even to a considerable degree about 
 their own private affairs, is so marked as almost to 
 indicate an intention on the part of nature that they 
 shall not much concern themselves with what is 
 ahead of them.
 
 Lincoln and Foresight 261 
 
 There were, however, some prescient souls who 
 did foresee our struggle. Webster no doubt had 
 some prevision of the contest in which his only 
 son was to die. "When my eyes turn to behold 
 for the last time the Sun in his coming," etc. Mr. 
 S. J. Tilden said to John Bigelow some years before 
 the war "If Mr. Bryant and those who think as he 
 does succeed in what they are about, the streets of 
 this city will run red with blood." They did run 
 red during the draft riots, much redder than is com 
 monly understood. Mr. Loyall Farragut tells me 
 that his father, Admiral Farragut (then Captain 
 Farragut), and he were on the balcony of the old 
 Metropolitan Hotel in Broadway one flight in 1858 
 and were looking at a Republican torchlight pro 
 cession, when his father said "I don't like these 
 marching men. It looks to me like war." There 
 were many who must have foreseen it. It seems to 
 me that I ought to have foreseen it myself. My 
 father had a friend, John Heart, who was a Federal 
 office holder at Washington under Buchanan. He 
 was from South Carolina and had been editor of the 
 "Charleston Mercury," the paper which the morning 
 after the passage of the ordinance of Secession by 
 South Carolina printed the news from the North 
 under the heading of "Foreign Intelligence." He 
 came to pay us a visit in Brooklyn in the summer 
 of 1860. He had just been in Charleston and from 
 what he told us we could have no doubt that South 
 Carolina would secede if Lincoln were elected. I 
 had been lately much in the South and, although 
 only seventeen years old, knew enough of the temper 
 and characteristics of the southern people to be 
 aware that secession once started, it would be very
 
 262 A Virginian Village 
 
 difficult to prevent the spread of it. But youth is 
 sanguine and precipitate. I wanted to see the 
 power of slavery curtailed, and was willing to take 
 the chances, and no doubt other boys and young men 
 felt as I did. 
 
 Calhoun, perhaps the most prescient of American 
 statesmen, foresaw the struggle and wanted to bring 
 on the war before the strength of the rapidly grow 
 ing North should prove too great to be withstood 
 by the South. The scheme of the North should 
 have been to put off the struggle as long as possible 
 for the same reason. If Calhoun saw what was for 
 the interest of the South, it should not have required 
 superhuman intelligence on the part of the North to 
 see where its interests lay. No one, however, in the 
 North seemed to see this point quite as sharply as 
 Calhoun did. But there were those in the North 
 who saw that great danger, perhaps disunion and war, 
 would follow anti-slavery agitation, and who wished 
 to adhere to the status quo, preferring the chances 
 of the future to the present probability of secession 
 and war, and thinking that it was better that the 
 slaves should remain for a while longer in bondage 
 than that the people of the country should be cutting 
 one another's throats. The men who were of this 
 opinion, the Websters, the Everetts, the Rufus 
 Choates and the Tildens, with their larger and 
 calmer intelligence and their greater knowledge of 
 the real conditions of the country, were, I cannot 
 help thinking, the true statesmen of that day. 
 
 But how would it have been possible after the 
 repeal of the Missouri Compromise to put off the 
 war? If Douglas, the marplot or demagogue or 
 egotist, or whatever he was, could have been sup-
 
 Lincoln and Foresight 263 
 
 pressed, it might have been possible to postpone the 
 war for four or eight years or even longer. But the 
 repeal once passed, and Pandora's box open, and the 
 newspapers and all the poets and orators hounding 
 the country on to war, was it possible to do it? You 
 cannot teach tact and discretion to twenty millions 
 of people. One night in Plymouth Church in 
 Brooklyn, a few weeks before John Brown's execu 
 tion, so a friend told me who was there Wendell 
 Phillips, a Massachusetts man, said "The state 
 proclamations of Massachusetts conclude with the 
 words 'God save the commonwealth of Massa 
 chusetts,' but if Massachusetts allows John Brown 
 to be hanged, I say, 'God damn the commonwealth 
 of Massachusetts.'" The effect of this spoken with 
 the utmost passion to a vast, excited and sympa 
 thetic audience by a perfectly honest fanatic, who 
 was at the same time an incomparable orator, may 
 be easily conceived. When such incidents were 
 possible, could war be far off? If the war was to 
 come, Lincoln was the perfect and apparently 
 Heaven appointed leader, and it was perhaps for 
 tunate that he was no wiser than he was. He might 
 have lined up as a Democrat, and the country would 
 have lost him. It is often said that horses are un 
 intelligent, but if a horse knew a little more than he 
 does, he would not let you ride him at all; and it is 
 possible that Providence, or Fate, in its large de 
 signs, may make use of the ignorance of horses and 
 of great statesmen in about the same way.
 
 VIRGINIA WOMEN 
 
 THE peculiar characteristics which marked the 
 women of our southern states were due in 
 part to the fact that the southern people had more 
 leisure than any other people in the country. They 
 had the slaves to do the hard work. The men were 
 thus subject to that "love in idleness," which the 
 poet, in a passage of incomparable delicacy, suggests 
 as an extremely virulent variety of the disorder. 
 The women were admired and worshipped, as were 
 no other women I have ever known. This fact gave 
 them a peculiar force and courage. They behaved 
 with that natural grace and spoke with that elo 
 quence, which are the results of perfect liberty, and 
 this liberty was again the result of the sympathy 
 and kindness with which they were regarded. Their 
 voices were better than those of most northern wom 
 en, although there was a wildness and rusticity in 
 their speech, which was a good deal like that of 
 the negroes, with whom they were brought up. I 
 had always supposed that this speech was caught 
 by the whites from the negroes. But the late Ed 
 ward Eggleston, who was an authority on American 
 Colonial history, assured me that it was copied by 
 the negroes from the whites, and was like the speech 
 used in England during the seventeenth and eight 
 eenth centuries. I should, however, doubt the 
 truth of this explanation. Their voices were very 
 saccharine, in this respect resembling the drug of 
 that name which is said to have forty times the 
 strength of sugar. I have in mind one of these
 
 Virginia Women 265 
 
 ladies who was a friend of mine, and who was a cele 
 brated Virginia belle. She was very handsome, but 
 she was much more than a pretty woman, for she 
 had strong sense and a great deal of humor. She 
 took me once in a southern city to an evening party, 
 where the average of feminine good looks, it seemed 
 to me, was as high as in a London drawing room in 
 the day of the professional beauties. The rooms 
 were crowded and she went ahead of me, introducing 
 me to people as we passed. I could not but be 
 struck, as I followed her, with the movements, at 
 once energetic and graceful, of the strongly made 
 figure. Among other people she introduced me to 
 a man whom I had heard make a brilliant speech in 
 Congress in antebellum days. I had told her that 
 I had heard him make this speech. She introduced 
 me to him, and then pulled me away from him before 
 I had time to say anything. She explained after 
 wards : " I was awfully afraid you'd tell him you had 
 heard him speak in Congress when you were a boy 
 before the war. He thinks himself a great beau and 
 flirt. I don't know what he would have done to 
 you." I had not known her as a girl, but I could 
 understand how irresistible she must have been at 
 that time. Irresistible, indeed, she still was. Then 
 she was, as southern women are apt to be, through 
 and through a woman. She was of a vigorous phy 
 sique and had strong health. Possessed of such 
 qualities as I have indicated and richly endowed, as 
 she was, with the force and the attractions of sex, 
 and speaking a patois that Venus might have picked 
 up in Africa, it was easy to imagine the effect she 
 must have produced among the idle and susceptible 
 southern youth.
 
 266 A Virginian Village 
 
 Early in the last century three southern women, 
 who had some of the qualities here indicated, and, I 
 dare say, the same speech, went to England, where 
 they made great marriages. Their name was Caton, 
 and they were called the Three 'Graces. One of 
 them was dining at Windsor Castle in William the 
 Fourth's time, when a man at the table asked her 
 whether she came from the part of the country 
 where they guess or where they calculate. The 
 King said with emphasis, "She's from neither; she's 
 from the part of the country where they fascinate.'' 
 These ladies were from Maryland and were much 
 like Virginia women, as were also the women of 
 Washington and the District of Columbia, Wash 
 ington having been till the time of the war very 
 much a southern city. I knew in London a sister of 
 Lord Napier, who was British Minister in Washing 
 ton in the late fifties, and who had retired from the 
 service and was living in London. She asked me to 
 dine to meet her brother, and I had some very in 
 teresting talk with him about Washington in those 
 days. Among other interesting things, I remember 
 he told me that at that time there were more pretty 
 girls in Georgetown than there were in London. 
 The well known poet, "Owen Meredith," afterwards 
 Lord Lytton and Governor General of India, was an 
 attache of his uncle, Sir Henry Bulwer, British 
 Minister in Washington during the early fifties and 
 one of Lord Napier's predecessors. Lytton's biog 
 rapher informs us that, while in Washington, he fell 
 in love with some girl who did not smile upon his 
 suit. The poor young fellow he was scarcely more 
 than a boy was in the deepest dejection. I wonder 
 if it could have been one of these Georgetown girls.
 
 Virginia Women 267 
 
 I have a boyish recollection of the most celebrated 
 of these Washington beauties. Shortly before the 
 war I was at school in Washington. In those days 
 a man named Shepard had a book store on the corner 
 of Seventh and D Streets. Shepard was a kind, 
 brisk little man, who used to let me come on Sat 
 urdays and read all day long in his shop. One fine, 
 balmy spring day the little place became suddenly a 
 scene of great splendor. Mr. Robert A. Pryor, at 
 that time a member of Congress from Virginia and 
 an ardent advocate of Douglas's election to the 
 presidency, entered as the convoy of the Illinois 
 Senator and his wife. Of Mr. Douglas I remember 
 not very much, but I have a lively recollection of 
 the lady who accompanied him, whose beauty was 
 very celebrated. Mrs. Douglas was indeed the 
 most celebrated woman of society in the country. I 
 have her before me very clearly indeed. I remember 
 a figure, tall and majestic, gliding with conscious 
 queenliness about the little shop, which seemed 
 strangely honored by such a visitation. I remember 
 a swan-like step and the rustling and swaying of a 
 skirt, the balloon-like skirt of the period a garment, 
 by the way, to the contemporary eye, most expres 
 sive of discretion and dignity which flowed after 
 and pursued the gliding figure. I remember a de 
 meanor lofty and gracious. From what heights she 
 looks downward! The voice is full and stately. She 
 speaks little, however, but looks downward and 
 about her with a dignified recognition; amiable, 
 condescending, kind even, yet with no thought of 
 abating one jot of her graces and splendors, the full 
 force of which she well comprehends the sort of 
 apparition very crushing to a boy of fifteen, to whom
 
 268 A Virginian Village 
 
 she is not, as she would be to you or me, a woman, 
 who has had, like another, an infancy and girlhood. 
 To such eyes she stands absolute, unrelated to time 
 or cause. The garments she wore were no more put 
 on than was Diana's tunic or the cestus of Aphrodite. 
 Such as she was, stately and beautiful presence, fine 
 voice, flowing skirt and gliding motion, chignon, 
 crinoline and all, such she had been created. 
 
 The wit of the women was applauded and en 
 couraged as much as their beauty was admired and 
 extolled. One young Richmond girl of wartime had 
 great fame for wit. I have heard many examples 
 of it and have seen some of them in print. The wit 
 of them was well enough, but that was not so inter 
 esting to me as was the sweet, artless confidence 
 they expressed in the kindness with which they 
 would be received. I thought they were scarcely so 
 good as the following, which was told me by her 
 sister and must of course have been true. Her father, 
 a distinguished southern lawyer and statesman, was 
 a religious man and was anxious that his daugh 
 ters should be religious, and he asked his pastor, an 
 eminent Presbyterian clergyman, to speak to her 
 upon this subject. It is perhaps not understood to 
 what a degree the South was a religious community. 
 It was perhaps the most religious part of the coun 
 try. This may have been due to the fact that it was 
 a conservative community. The necessity they 
 were under to be silent about slavery put a restraint 
 upon liberty of mind. Such mental life as the South 
 had, and there was not much of it, thus found a safe 
 outlet in religious interest and feeling. In one of 
 Trollope's novels, written during our Civil War, 
 there is a rural Dean, who was strongly Southern in
 
 Virginia Women 269 
 
 his sympathies, and who was in the habit of saying 
 that the Southerners were Christian gentlemen and 
 the Northerners were infidel snobs. I think the 
 Southerners were Christian gentlemen. The clergy 
 man, whose aid this Christian gentleman had re 
 quested, was an old man and a widower. He took 
 the young lady for a drive in the cemetery, and they 
 got out at the grave of the young lady's mother. 
 The clergyman thought this a good opportunity to 
 introduce the subject he had in mind, and he told 
 her that there was a matter of great importance upon 
 which he wished to speak to her. The young girl 
 saw what was coming, and wished to head him off. 
 So she said: "Doctor H., do you think it proper to 
 take advantage of this opportunity, when I am 
 standing here by the grave of my mother, to make 
 me a declaration of love and an offer of marriage?" 
 Of course, any serious conversation was out of the 
 question after that. This young girl died at an 
 early age, and the people of Richmond, who were 
 very fond and proud of her, followed her to the grave. 
 The shops of the town, a city of forty thousand peo 
 ple, were closed at this time. 
 
 At one of the Virginia springs they told me this 
 incident: A southern girl appeared there who was 
 very handsome, if of a somewhat bold type of beauty, 
 and she at once had a string of men following her. 
 She was perhaps somewhat wanting in refinement, 
 a quality which men do not much mind, if offset by 
 attractions sufficiently powerful. The women of 
 course did not approve of her at all, and liked her 
 none the better for taking their beaux away from 
 them, and they did not scruple to ask her who she 
 was and where she came from. She replied with
 
 270 A Virginian Village 
 
 much good temper that she was the daughter of a 
 southern planter, a planter being about the most 
 respectable thing you can be in the South. The young 
 girl spoke with as much truth as wit, for it turned out 
 that her father was an undertaker. 
 
 I met an English Cavalry officer some years ago 
 in England, I think at Aldershot, who came to me 
 and asked me if I could tell him anything of two la 
 dies of Richmond, whom he had formerly known. 
 He told me this incident. He said that he was travel 
 ing in company with these ladies, then young girls, 
 on a steamer. The steamer was crowded, and some 
 of the passengers were obliged to sleep upon the deck. 
 The feet of one of these young ladies were in close 
 proximity to his head. She remarked that she re 
 minded herself of the motto, "Sic semper tyrannis" 
 in the coat-of-arms of the State of Virginia, in which 
 Virginia is represented as a female figure with her 
 foot on the head of a prostrate man, presumably a 
 tyrant. He said he thought that very bright of her. 
 This young lady came rightly by her gift of humorous 
 fancy. There can be no harm in my saying that she 
 was the daughter of Mr. John Y. Mason, who was 
 our minister in Paris in the early days of the Second 
 Empire, and who was himself a man of a somewhat 
 whimsical, if indiscreet, humor, if we may judge 
 from this story, which has been told me by some of 
 the pleasant people, who were about Paris in that 
 pleasant time. The Haitian minister in Paris at that 
 time was an accomplished gentleman and a superior 
 man, but was, as Haitian diplomats usually are, a 
 negro. Mr. Mason, on being asked his opinion of his 
 Haitian colleague, replied that he thought he was 
 worth about a thousand dollars, that being the price
 
 Virginia Women 271 
 
 of an able-bodied colored man at that time in Vir 
 ginia. 
 
 I have never seen women who had a greater gift 
 of friendship, of friendship in which there was no 
 admixture of any different sentiment, than the wom 
 en of the South. I am speaking of the married 
 women. Before marriage I dare say there was plenty 
 of flirtation among them. I believe for instance 
 that they had a habit of temporary engagements, 
 in which, so southern ladies have assured me, men 
 were not allowed the privileges which are usually 
 permitted to engaged lovers. These young women 
 were such divinities that I dare say that they could 
 have exacted any conditions they liked from these 
 patient admirers, and that any bluff they were 
 minded to put up would have been successful. I 
 believe this habit of temporary engagements was 
 very general. I have heard that a well-known 
 southern literary man, on being asked why he had 
 never offered himself to a certain clever and much 
 admired young woman, replied that she had never 
 happened to be disengaged at the same time that he 
 was. The gift the married women had of friendship 
 in which there was no admixture of flirtation may 
 have borne some relation to the fact that the standard 
 of chastity amongst southern women was very high. 
 A violation of the marital vows was pretty sure to 
 result in bloodshed. The young girls had the same 
 protection. I dare say there was also a certain pro 
 tection for the white women in the relations which 
 existed between the two races in the South. 
 
 Southern women were very decidedly persons; 
 they were often women of a great deal of ability. 
 The wife of a planter who had fifty or a hundred
 
 272 A Virginian Village 
 
 slaves, and many of the planters had more, had a 
 great deal to do in feeding and clothing them. Then, 
 as almost everything they used came off the planta 
 tion, the gardens, the milk, cream and butter, and to 
 certain extent, the stock, were in the keeping of the 
 women of the house. There was thus a great deal of 
 opportunity, if not of necessity, for the possession 
 of business ability by these ladies. I may here give 
 a brief sketch of a Virginian woman who was a great 
 friend of mine, and who had some of the qualities I 
 have mentioned. She was, when I knew her, a 
 woman approaching middle age. She had been a 
 very handsome girl, and was a comely and a fine 
 woman still. She had been as a girl, so I have been 
 told, a great flirt, the energy of mind and character, 
 of which she had a great deal, being given up at that 
 time to the subject of her relations with her admirers. 
 Good comrade, as she was, with a very capacious 
 heart, I dare say she loved them all. She devoted 
 to these flirtations the same propulsive force which 
 later, when I knew her, she gave to other employ 
 ments. She married and had an only child, a 
 daughter, and became a widow. The daughter was 
 already grown, when I made their acquaintance. 
 This daughter was the passion of her life, the girl re 
 turning to the full the mother's affection and de 
 votion. To this daughter and to the care of the 
 property which had been left her by her husband, 
 and which she managed with energy and ability, she 
 devoted her life. 
 
 Her love for the girl, however, did not interfere 
 with her power of affection for other people. On 
 the contrary, I dare say, it increased that capacity. 
 She had great humanity, and she loved men and
 
 Virginia Women 273 
 
 women, men I should say more than women. Women 
 were human beings, and she liked and admired cer 
 tain of them with the warmth which belonged to her 
 nature and with the intelligence of a bright and vig 
 orous mind. Still she was rather disposed to be 
 jealous of women. She was certainly extremely jeal 
 ous of young girls, who might in any way be rivals of 
 her daughter. That jealousy is a quality which is 
 very common among women, who have daughters. 
 They confront the world on their behalf with a fierce 
 ness somewhat like that of other members of the ani 
 mal creation. An extreme example of the quality 
 would be a she-grizzly with a cub, which is said to be 
 the most terrible thing there is. This quality, as one 
 sees it in women, should not be regarded as unpleas 
 ant or ridiculous; it has, on the contrary, a kind of 
 sublimity; it is the reverse of the medal of maternal 
 affection. My friend had it in a very marked degree. 
 I doubt if it was ever quite agreeable to her to hear 
 the praises of young women other than her daughter. 
 The girl was very charming, of course; she had two 
 qualities which I remember especially, fine eyes and 
 a good voice. She had an eye, the delicate blue of 
 which had been painted by the Divine Artist with a 
 pencil so exquisite as almost to baffle comprehension, 
 and certainly to elude memory and imagination. Her 
 voice was extremely round, clear and fresh, and it 
 had a truth such as I don't think it would be in the 
 power of any feature of the countenance to convey. 
 Nevertheless there were other girls with fine eyes and 
 good voices. But they did not exist for the mother 
 of this one. 
 
 She was active in the charities of the neighborhood, 
 and in the work of a neighboring church, and had
 
 274 A Virginian Village 
 
 been a great friend of the clergyman and his family. 
 A new clergyman, who was rich, had succeeded him, 
 which was a source of regret to her, as she said that 
 she could no longer send the parsonage a mince pie 
 or a turkey, when she was so disposed. She was 
 religious, as southern women often are. The old 
 families of her part of the state were as a rule Episco 
 palians, and she was of that faith. In colonial times, 
 of course, that had been the established religion. 
 An old Colonial planter in top boots once got up in 
 the Virginia House of Burgesses and said that, 
 while he had no prejudices against other religious 
 denominations, still he had a feeling that the only 
 road to Heaven for a gentleman to follow was the 
 Episcopal. He no doubt spoke the Virginia Colonial 
 feeling. In travelling through certain parts of Vir 
 ginia if you find a church of some denomination other 
 than the Episcopal which dates from Colonial times, 
 it is likely to be out in the country, three or four miles 
 from a town. This I have been told, was because the 
 establishment in Colonial times would not consent 
 to these churches being built in the towns. Virginia 
 has still English eighteenth-century characteristics 
 in religion as in other matters. The Episcopalians 
 of that state have been usually low church, as was the 
 established church in England, during the eighteenth 
 century. But their religion was not so dry and dull 
 as that of the English church usually was at that day, 
 having been to some degree affected by the Wes- 
 leyan revival, as indeed the whole South was. I 
 came upon an example of this lately in Virginia. 
 I was in an Episcopal church, when the Rector gave 
 notice of a series of revival meetings to be held in 
 the Methodist church in town, an incident unusual
 
 Virginia Women 275 
 
 in an Episcopal church. My friend's religion was of 
 this evangelical character. She was emotional in 
 religion as in other matters, and set much store by 
 her religious emotions. I remember once, when I 
 had spoken of the absurdity of the practice in some 
 churches of singing hymns, which are associated in 
 everybody's mind with certain tunes, to tunes which 
 are new and unfamiliar, she said with much feeling, 
 "Isn't that fiendish?" 
 
 She had other traits which were southern. She was 
 hospitable, of course, as was natural to the daugh 
 ter of people who lived on isolated farms and were 
 glad to be visited by friends, whom it cost nothing 
 in time or expense to entertain. She managed her 
 farm successfully, was a perfect housekeeper, had a 
 great knowledge of food, how the best could be pro 
 cured and how it should be cooked and served, and 
 she watched every detail in the management of a 
 large house. And yet she did all this as if it gave 
 her no great trouble. She was of a large build, rather 
 heavily made, but very active and nimble in her 
 movements. I used to like to see her moving about 
 the house with short, quick, busy steps, and with 
 serious mien. She talked incessantly, a characteristic 
 which seemed to be the result of her abundant force. 
 To me it was one of her attractions. "Two is no 
 company, and three is company of God," say the 
 Spaniards, which I think a true proverb. Three is 
 company of God, because, if you do not want to 
 talk, there are two others to keep the conversation 
 going. When there are only two, you must do your 
 share of the talking or at any rate of the listening. 
 But when you were left alone with this friend of 
 mine, there was no need of a third, for the flow of her
 
 276 A Virginian Village 
 
 monologue never ceased, but ran on as easily as a 
 brook slips along over pebbles, you listening in con 
 tented indolence. Of course a very frequent theme 
 with her was the daughter. She liked to repeat to 
 me stories, which I liked to hear, of the childhood 
 of the young girl, which showed her brightness of 
 mind and the sweetness of her temper. She got a 
 great deal of happiness out of this relation, but much 
 anxiety also. The future of the girl was evidently 
 a source of great concern to her, what her life would 
 be, after she, the mother, was no longer here to pro 
 tect and defend her. 
 
 She was a lady, too; with all her simplicity and 
 candor and warm and strong feeling, and her mental 
 and physical vigor, she was as well bred a woman as 
 you would meet in a long journey. No women in the 
 country excelled the best type of southern women in 
 that way. What a mother-in-law she would have 
 made for some fortunate young fellow, who had won 
 her friendship and affection; he would have been 
 pretty well spoiled. The lady I have here sketched 
 was a Virginia woman, and was characteristic of 
 that country. 
 
 Behind these fine characteristics of the women of 
 Virginia there were certain physical facts which had 
 their influence upon these women. Virginia had 
 a good climate and, as a rule, a good soil. The 
 people lived an out-door life, a life much like that 
 led by English country gentlemen. They hunted the 
 fox, they shot and fished. They had, especially 
 those who lived in tidewater Virginia and were near 
 the Chesapeake Bay, as good food as there was to 
 be had in the world. That was the opinion at any 
 rate of a certain very great Scottish gentleman, Mr.
 
 Virginia Women 277 
 
 Edward Ellice, who knew everything about food 
 and many subjects besides, and who had spent 
 much time in this country. He was a friend of 
 Mr. Royal Phelps, a fine old New Yorker whom 
 people of New York whose memories go back thirty- 
 five years or more will recall with pleasure, and who 
 lived in Sixteenth Street. Mr. Phelps' daughter 
 had married Governor Carroll of Maryland, and Mr. 
 Phelps was thus by way of getting the best of the 
 terrapin, the canvas back duck, the fish and the 
 oysters, and the many other excellent things that 
 were to be had in the region of the Chesapeake Bay. 
 Mr. Ellice was in the habit of saying that he believed 
 that Mr. Phelps had the best food to be got anywhere 
 in the world. This was the food which tidewater 
 Virginia had at its doors. Then they had the negro 
 cooks, who knew how to prepare it. They had be 
 sides the time and the leisure to eat it. It was 
 natural that this life and this food should produce a 
 strong race, and it did do that. It was natural also 
 that it should produce a handsome race. The women 
 of Virginia were the descendants of the people who 
 had lived this life and had had these advantages. 
 
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