Chapter LXVII: A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the (3)

Of the men I need only say that they were masculine, and fit mates for such women. I do not at all think they were personally superior to men of other parts of the country in those things that pertain to character and conduct, but at least they had the advantage of living in a community where public opinion was all-dominant, and where that resistless force insisted upon truth, integrity, and personal courage as qualities that every man must possess if he expected to live in that community at all. It was _noblesse oblige_, and it inexorably controlled the conduct of all men who hoped for recognition as gentlemen.

The sentiment took quixotic forms at times, perhaps, but no jesting over these manifestations can obscure the fact that it compelled men to good behavior in every relation of life and made life sweeter, wholesomer, and more fruitful of good than it otherwise would have been.

[Sidenote: The Voices of Virginia Women]

I must add a word with respect to that most fascinating of all things, the Virginia girl's voice. This was music of so entrancing a sort that I have known young men from other parts of the country to fall in love with a voice before they had seen its possessor and to remain in love with the owner of it in spite of her distinct lack of beauty when revealed in person.

Those girls all dropped the "g"s at the end of their participles; they habitually used double negatives, and, quite defiantly of dictionaries, used Virginian locutions not sanctioned by authority. If challenged on the subject their reply would have been that which John Esten Cooke gave to an editor who wanted to strike a phrase out of one of his Virginia romances, on the ground that it was not good English. "It's good Virginian," he answered, "and for my purpose that is more important."

But all such defects of speech--due not to ignorance but to a charming wilfulness--were forgotten in the music of the voices that gave them utterance.

There are no such voices now, even in Virginia, I regret to say. Not of their own fault, but because of contact with strangely altered conditions, the altogether charming Virginia girls I sometimes meet nowadays, have voices and intonations not unlike those of women in other parts of the country, except that they preserve enough of the old lack of emphasis upon the stronger syllables to render their speech often difficult to understand. There is compensation for that in the gentle, laughing readiness with which they repeat utterances not understood on their first hearing.

XXIV

It was during the roseate years of the old Virginia life not long before the war that I had my first and only serious experience of what is variously and loosely called the "occult" and the "supernatural."

It is only in answer to solicitation that I tell the story here as it has been only in response to like solicitation that I have orally told it before.

In order that I may not be misunderstood, in order that I may not be unjustly suspected of a credulity that does not belong to me, I wish to say at the outset that I am by nature and by lifelong habit of mind a skeptic. I believe in the natural order, in cause and effect, in the material basis of psychological phenomena. I have no patience with the mystical or the mysterious. I do not believe in the miraculous, the supernatural, the occult--call it what you will.

And yet the experience I am about to relate is literally true, and the story of it a slavishly faithful record of facts. I make no attempt to reconcile those facts with my beliefs or unbeliefs. I venture upon no effort at explanation. I have set forth above my intellectual attitude toward all such matters; I shall set forth the facts of this experience with equal candor. If the reader finds the facts irreconcilable with my intellectual convictions, I must leave him to judge as he may between the two, without aid of mine. The facts are these:

I was one of a house party, staying at one of the most hospitable of Virginia mansions. I was by courtesy of Virginia clannishness "cousin" to the mistress of the house, and when no house party was in entertainment I was an intimate there, accustomed to go and come at will and to reckon myself a member of the family by brevet.

[Sidenote: The Story of the West Wing]

At the time now considered, the house was unusually full, when a letter came announcing the immediate coming of still other guests. In my close intimacy with the mistress of the plantation I became aware of her perplexity. She didn't know where and how to bestow the presently coming guests. I suggested that I and some others should take ourselves away, a suggestion which her hospitable soul rejected, the more particularly in my case, perhaps, because I was actively planning certain entertainments in which she was deeply interested. Suddenly it occurred to me that during my long intimacy in the house I had never known anybody to occupy the room or rooms which constituted the second story of the west wing of the building. I asked why not bring that part of the spacious mansion into use in this emergency, thinking that its idleness during all the period of my intimacy there had been due only to the lack of need in a house so large.

"Cousin Mary," with a startled look of inquiry upon her face, glanced at her husband, who sat with us alone on a piazza.

"You may as well tell him the facts," he said in reply to the look. "He won't talk."

Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superstition. Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the lawyer finished, even to sign the document; that he placed it under his pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it, changing only one clause in such fashion as to defeat the long cherished purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old man executed that instead of the other.

"Now I'm not superstitious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly, "but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result."

"It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?"

"They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered, "though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had been."

"What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity.

"Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other, but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten years we permitted no repetition of the experiment, but a year ago my brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs with barely enough strength to cling to the balustrades, and in such an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again."

[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts]

"Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked.

"Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered more."

"Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with your permission."

"You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to permit a further trifling with it."

"Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that nobody can question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been."

Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night.

I seized upon the occasion to give a warning.

"I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes."

The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no trespass upon my privacy.

"With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may make to drive me out."

It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of the eight great windows of the room.

I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with brass knobs.

The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a spacious closet which I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that the closets were entirely empty.

Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways, and went to sleep.

[Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light]

After a time I suddenly waked to find the room dimly pervaded by that yellowish-gray or grayish-yellow light that had so disturbed the slumbers of others in that apartment. My awakening was so complete that all my faculties were alert at once. I felt under my pillow and found my weapon there. I looked to its chambers and found the charges undisturbed. The caps were in place, and I felt myself armed for any encounter.

But I had resolved in advance, to be deliberate, self-possessed, and calm, whatever might happen, and I kept faith with myself. Instead of hastily springing from the bed I lay there for a time watching the weird light as it slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in intensity, and trying to decide whether they were right who had described as "yellowish gray" or they who had called it "grayish yellow." I decided that the gray distinctly predominated, but in the meanwhile the steady increase in the light and in its pervasiveness warned me, and I slipped out of bed, taking my pistol with me, to the dressing case on the other side of the room--the side on which the great oaken door opened.

The rain was still beating heavily against the window blinds, and the strange, yellowish gray light was still slowly but steadily increasing. I was resolute, however, in my determination not to be disturbed or hurried by any manifestation. In response to that determination I glanced at the mirror and decided that the mysterious light was sufficient for the purpose, and I resolved I would shave.

Having done so, I bathed--a little hurriedly, perhaps, because of the rapidly increasing light. I was deliberate, however, in donning my clothing, and not until I was fully dressed did I turn to leave the room. Glancing at every object in it--all now clearly visible, though somewhat shadowy in outline--I decided at last upon my retreat. I turned the key, and the bolt in the lock shot back with sound enough to startle calmer nerves than mine.

I turned the knob, but the door refused to open!

For a moment I was puzzled. Then I remembered that it was a double lock. A second later I was out of that chamber, and the oaken door of it was securely shut behind me.

I went down the great stairway, slowly, deliberately, in pursuance of my resolution; I entered the large hallway below, and thence passed into the oak-wainscoted dining-room, where I sat down to breakfast with the rest of the company.

It was nine o'clock of a dark, rainy morning.

XXV

In Virginia at the time of which I am writing, everybody, men, women, and children, read books and talked about them. The annual output of the publishers was trifling then, as compared with the present flood of new books, and as a consequence everybody read all the new books and magazines, and everybody talked about them as earnestly as of politics or religion. Still more diligently they read old books, the classics of the language. Literature was regarded as a vital force in human affairs, and books which in our time might relieve the tedium of a railway journey and be forgotten at its end, were read with minute attention and discussed as earnestly as if vital interests had depended upon an accurate estimation of their quality.

As a consequence, authorship was held in strangely glamorous esteem. I beg pardon of the English language for making that word "glamorous"; it expresses my thought, as no other term does, and it carries its meaning on its face.

[Sidenote: The "Solitary Horseman"]

I remember that in my student days in Richmond there came a visitor who had written one little book--about Rufus Choate, I think, though I can find no trace of it in bibliographies. I suspect that he was a very small author, indeed, in Boston, whence he came, but he was an AUTHOR--we always thought that word in capital letters--and so he was dined and wined, and entertained, and not permitted to pay his own hotel bills or cab charges, or anything else.

Naturally a people so disposed made much of their own men of letters, of whom there was quite a group--if we reckon their qualifications as generously as the Virginians did. Among them were three at least whose claim to be regarded as authors was beyond dispute. These were John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and the English novelist, G. P. R. James, who at that time was serving as British consul at Richmond. And there was Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, who played the part of literary queen right royally.

Mr. James was a conspicuous figure in Richmond. He was a robust Englishman in his late fifties, rather short and rather stout. The latter impression was aided by the fact that in his afternoon saunterings about the town, he usually wore a sort of roundabout, a coat that ended at his waist and had no tails to it. To the ribald and the jocular he was known as "the Solitary Horseman" because of his habit of introducing novels or chapters with a lonely landscape in which a "solitary horseman" was the chief or only figure. To those of us who were disposed to be deferential he was known as "the Prince Regent," in memory of the jest perpetrated by one of the wits of the town. Mr. James's three initials, which prompted John G. Saxe to say that he "got at the font his strongest claims to be reckoned a man of letters"--stood for "George Payne Rainsford," but he rarely used anything more than the initials--G. P. R. When a certain voluble gentlewoman asked Tom August what the initials stood for he promptly replied:

"Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name."

The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends from that hour forth.

John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_. Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition. He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter. Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class.

When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because of the fact.

[Sidenote: John Esten Cooke--Gentleman]

Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel "The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines and the like.

The matter of getting a living was a difficult one to him then, for the reason that with a pride of race which some might think quixotic, he had burdened his young life with heavy obligations not his own. His father had died leaving debts that his estate could not pay. As the younger man got nothing by inheritance, except the traditions of honor that belonged to his race, he was under no kind of obligation with respect to those debts. But with a chivalric loyalty such as few men have ever shown, John Esten Cooke made his dead father's debts his own and little by little discharged them with the earnings of a toilsome literary activity.

His pride was so sensitive that he would accept no help in this, though friends earnestly pressed loans upon him when he had a payment to meet and his purse was well-nigh empty. At such times he sometimes made his dinner on crackers and tea for many days together, although he knew he would be a more than welcome guest at the lavish tables of his many friends in Richmond. It was a point of honor with him never to accept a dinner or other invitation when he was financially unable to dine abundantly at his own expense.

The reviewer of one of my own stories of the old Virginia life, not long ago informed his readers that of course there never were men so sensitively and self-sacrificingly honorable as those I had described in the book, though my story presented no such extreme example of the man of honor as that illustrated in Mr. Cooke's person and career.

I knew him intimately at that time, his immediate friends being my own kindred. Indeed, I passed one entire summer in the same hospitable house with him.

Some years after the war our acquaintance was renewed, and from that time until his death he made my house his abiding place whenever he had occasion to be in New York. Time had wrought no change in his nature. He remained to the end the high-spirited, duty-loving man of honor that I had known in my youth; he remained also the gentle, affectionate, and unfailingly courteous gentleman he had always been.

He went into the war as an enlisted man in a Richmond battery, but was soon afterward appointed an officer on the staff of the great cavalier, J. E. B. Stuart.

"I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching, just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays."

[Sidenote: How Jeb Stuart Made a Major]

Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice.

On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did it.

"You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in the chest."

"Yes, I am," answered Cooke.

"Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping for a boxing match. "Try that on."

Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it a fit.

"Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow."

When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity. The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was entitled to ease and comfort as his reward.

XXVI

The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record of facts.

It was not a life that our modern notions of economics can approve, but it ministered to human happiness, to refinement of mind, to culture, and to the maintenance of high ideals of manhood and womanhood. It bred a race of men who spoke the truth, lived uprightly, and met every duty without a shadow of flinching from personal consequences. It reared a race of women fit to be the wives and mothers of such men. Under its spell culture was deemed of more account than mere education; living was held in higher regard than getting a living; refinement meant more than display; comfort more than costliness, and kindliness in every word and act more than all else.

[Sidenote: A Plantation Modernized]

I know an old plantation where for generations a family of brave men and fair women dwelt in peace and ministered in gracious, hospitable ways to the joy of others. Under their governance there was never any thought of exploiting the resources of the plantation for the sake of a potential wealth that seemed superfluous to people of contented mind who had enough. The plantation supported itself and all who dwelt upon it--black and white. It educated its sons and daughters and enabled them to maintain a generous hospitality. More than this they did not want or dream of wanting.

There are twenty-two families living on that plantation now, most of them growing rich or well-to-do by the cultivation of the little truck farms into which the broad acres have been parceled out. The woodlands that used to shelter the wild flowers and furnish fuel for the great open fireplaces, have been stripped to furnish kindling wood for kitchen ranges in Northern cities. Even the stately locust trees that had shaded the lawns about the old mansion have been converted into policemen's clubs and the like, and potatoes grow in the soil where greensward used to carpet the house grounds.

Economically the change means progress and prosperity, of course, but to me the price paid for it seems out of proportion to the goods secured. But then I am old-fashioned, and perhaps, in spite of the strenuous life I have led, I am a sentimentalist,--and sentiment is scorned as silly in these days.

There is another aspect of the matter that deserves a word, and I have a mind to write that word even at risk of anathema from all the altars of sociology. At seventy years of age one is less sensitive to criticism than at thirty.

All the children of the twenty-two truck farming families on that old plantation go to school. They are taught enough to make out bills, add up columns of figures, and write business letters to their commission merchants. That is what education means now on that plantation and on hundreds of others that have undergone a like metamorphosis. No thought or dream of culture enters into the scheme. Under the old system rudimentary instruction was merely a stepping stone by which to climb up to the education of culture. Under the theories of economics it is a great gain thus to substitute rudimentary instruction for all in the place of real education and culture for a class. But is it gain? Is the world better off with ten factory hands who can read, write, and cipher, than with one Thomas Jefferson or George Wythe or Samuel Adams or Chancellor Livingston who knows how to think? Are ten factory girls or farmers' wives the full equivalent of one cultured gentlewoman presiding gracefully and graciously over a household in which the amenities of life are more considered than its economics?

Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming. But is the world richer or poorer for the change?

It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps.

However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women--once admired throughout the land--are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and "reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peacock in which they speak, not that of the dove.

[Sidenote: An Old Fogy's Questionings]

Whenever I ask myself the questions set down above, I find it necessary to the chastening of my mind to recite my creed:

I believe that every human being born into this world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as in doing as he pleases he does not interfere with the equal right of any other human being to do as he pleases;

I believe in the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

I believe that it is the sole legitimate function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone.

Nevertheless, I cannot escape a tender regret when I reflect upon what we have sacrificed to the god Progress. I suppose it is for the good of all that we have factories now to do the work that in my boyhood was done by the village carpenter, tanner, shoemaker, hatter, tailor, tin-smith, and the rest; but I do not think a group of factory "hands," dwelling in repulsively ugly tenement buildings and dependent upon servitude to the trade union as a means of escaping enslavement by an employing corporation, mean as much of human happiness or signify as much of helpful citizenship as did the home-owning, independent village workmen of the past. In the same way I do not think the substitution of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture of a class has been altogether a gain. As I see young men flocking by thousands to our universities, where in earlier times there were scant hundreds in attendance, I cannot avoid the thought that most of these thousands have just enough education of the drill sort to pass the entrance examinations and that they go to the universities, not for education of the kind that brings enlargement of mind, but for technical training in arts that promise money as the reward of their practice. And I cannot help wondering if the change which relegates the Arts course to a subordinate place in the university scheme is altogether a change for the better. Economically it is so, of course. But economics, it seems to me, ought not to be all of human life. Surely men and women were made for something more than mere earning capacity.

But all this is blasphemy against the great god Progress and heresy to the gospel of Success. Its voice should be hushed in a land where fame is awarded not to those who think but to those who organize and exploit; where men of great intellect feel that they cannot afford to serve the country when the corporations offer them so much higher salaries; and where it is easier to control legislation and administration by purchase than by pleading.

The old order changed, both at the North and at the South when the war came, and if the change is more marked in the South than at the North it is only because the South lost in the struggle for supremacy and suffered desolation in its progress.

XXVII

I have elsewhere pointed out in print that Virginia did not want war, or favor secession. Her people, who had already elected the avowed emancipationist, John Letcher, to be their governor, voted by heavy majorities against withdrawal from the Union. In her constitutional convention, called to consider what the old mother state should do after the Cotton States had set up a Southern Confederacy, the dominant force was wielded by such uncompromising opponents of secession as Jubal A. Early, Williams C. Wickham, Henry A. Wise, and others, who when war came were among the most conspicuous fighters on the Southern side. It is important to remember that, as Farragut said, Virginia was "dragooned out of the Union," in spite of the abiding unwillingness of her people.

[Sidenote: Under Jeb Stuart's Command]

I was a young lawyer then, barely twenty-one years of age. I spoke and voted--my first vote--against the contemplated madness. But in common with the Virginians generally, I enlisted as soon as war became inevitable, and from the 9th of April, 1861, to the 9th of April, 1865--the date of Lee's surrender--I was a soldier in active service.

I was intensely in earnest in the work of the soldier. As I look back over my seventy years of life, I find that I have been intensely in earnest in whatever I have had to do. Such things are temperamental, and one has no more control over his temperament than over the color of his eyes and hair.

Being intensely in earnest in the soldier's work, I enjoyed doing it, just as I have keenly enjoyed doing every other kind of work that has fallen to me during a life of unusually varied activity.

I went out in a company of horse, which after brief instruction at Ashland, was assigned to Stuart's First Regiment of Virginia Cavalry.

The regiment was composed entirely of young Virginians who, if not actually "born in the saddle," had climbed into it so early and lived in it so constantly that it had become the only home they knew. I suppose there was never gathered together anywhere on earth a body of horsemen more perfectly masters of their art than were the men of that First Regiment, the men whom Stuart knew by their names and faces then, and whose names and faces he never afterward forgot, for the reason, as he often said to us, that "You First Regiment fellows made me a Major-General." Even after he rose to higher rank and had scores of thousands of cavaliers under his command, his habit was, when he wanted something done of a specially difficult and dangerous sort, to order a detail from his old First Regiment to do it for him.

The horsemanship of that regiment remained till the end a model for emulation by all the other cavalry, and, in view of the demonstrations of it in the campaign preceding Manassas (Bull Run) it is no wonder that when the insensate panic seized upon McDowell's army in that battle the cry went up from the disintegrated mob of fugitives that they could not be expected to stand against "thirty thousand of the best horsemen since the days of the Mamelukes." The "thirty thousand" estimate was a gross exaggeration, Stuart's command numbering in fact only six or seven hundred, but the likening of its horsemanship to that of the Mamelukes was justified by the fact.

As a robust young man who had never known a headache I keenly enjoyed the life we cavalrymen led that summer. It was ceaselessly active--for Stuart's vocabulary knew not the word "rest"--and it was all out of doors in about as perfect a summer climate as the world anywhere affords.

We had some tents, in camp, in which to sleep after we got tired of playing poker for grains of corn; but we were so rarely in camp that after a little while we forgot that we owned canvas dwellings, and I cannot remember, if I ever knew, what became of them at last. For the greater part of the time we slept on the ground out somewhere within musket shot of the enemy's lines, and our waking hours were passed in playing "tag" with the enemy's scouting parties, encountered in our own impertinent intrusions into the lines of our foeman. A saddle was emptied now and then, but that was only a forfeit of the game, and the game went on.

[Sidenote: The Life of the Cavaliers]

It must have been a healthy life that we led. I well remember that during that summer my company never had a man on the sick list. When the extraordinary imbecility of the Confederate commissary department managed to get rations of flour to us, we wetted it with water from any stream or brook that might be at hand, added a little salt, if we happened to have any, to the putty-like mass, fried the paste in bacon fat, and ate it as bread. According to all the teachings of culinary science the thing ought to have sent all of us to grass with indigestions of a violent sort; but in fact we enjoyed it, and went on our scouting ways utterly unconscious of the fact that we were possessed of stomachs, until the tempting succulence of half-ripened corn in somebody's field set appetite a-going again and we feasted upon the grain without the bother of cooking it at all.

Of course, we carried no baggage with us during the days and weeks when we were absent from camp. We had a blanket apiece, somewhere, we didn't know where. When our shirts were soiled we took them off and washed them in the nearest brook, and if orders of activity came before they were dried, we put them on wet and rode away in full confidence that they would dry on our persons as easily as on a clothesline.

One advantage that I found in this neglect of impedimenta was that I could always carry a book or two inside my flannel shirt, and I feel now that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired to the reading done by bivouac fires at night and in the recesses of friendly cornfields by day.

There were many stories current among the good women at home in those days of men's lives being saved by Bibles carried in their clothes and opportunely serving as shields against bullets aimed at their wearers' hearts. I do not know how much truth there may have been in these interesting narratives, nor have I any trustworthy information upon which to base an estimate of the comparative armorplate efficacy of Bibles and other books. But one day, as I well remember, the impact of a bullet nearly knocked me off my horse, and I found afterward that the missile had deeply imbedded itself in a copy of "Tristram Shandy" which lay in the region of my transverse colon. A Bible of equal thickness would doubtless have served as well, but it was the ribald romance of Laurence Sterne that stopped a bullet and saved my life that day.

It may be worth while to add that the young woman from whom I had borrowed the book never would accept the new copy I offered to provide in exchange for the wounded one.

This cavalry service abounded in adventures, most of them of no great consequence, but all of them interesting at the time to those who shared in them. It was an exciting game and a fascinating one to a vigorous young man with enough imagination to appreciate it as I did. I enjoyed it intensely at the time and, as the memory of it comes back to me now, I find warmth enough still in my blood to make me wish it were all to do over again, with youth and health and high spirits as an accompaniment.

[Sidenote: Delights of the War Game]

War is "all hell," as General Sherman said, and as a writer during many years of peace, I have endeavored to do my part in making an end of it. I have printed much in illustration of the fact that war is a cruel, barbarous, inhuman device for settling controversies that should be settled and could be settled by more civilized means; I have shown forth its excessive costliness and its unspeakable cruelty to the women and children involved as its victims. I have no word of that to take back. But, as I remember the delights of the war game, I cannot altogether regret them. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that war, with all its inhuman cruelty, its devastation, and its slaughter, calls forth some of the noblest qualities of human nature, and breeds among men chivalric sentiments that it is well worth while to cherish.

And the inspiration of it is something that is never lost to the soul that has felt it. When the Spanish-American troubles came, and we all thought they portended a real war instead of the ridiculous "muss" that followed, the old spirit was so strong upon me that I enlisted a company of a hundred and twenty-four men and appealed to both the state and the national governments for the privilege of sharing in the fighting.

So much for psychology.

XXVIII

Among my experiences in the cavalry service was one which had a sequel that interested me.

Stuart had been promoted and Fitzhugh Lee, or "Fitz Lee" as we called him, had succeeded to the command of the First Regiment.

One day he led a party of us on a scouting expedition into the enemy's lines. In the course of it we charged through a strong infantry picket numbering forty or fifty men. As our half company dashed through, my horse was shot through the head and sank under me. My comrades rode on and I was left alone in the midst of the disturbed but still belligerent picket men. I had from the first made up my mind that I would never become a prisoner of war. I had stomach for fighting; I was ready to endure hardship; I had no shrinking from fatigue, privation, exposure, or anything else that falls to the lot of the soldier. But I was resolute in my determination that I would never "go to jail"--a phrase which fitly represented my conception of capture by the enemy.

So, when my horse dropped me there in the middle of a strong picket force, I drew both my pistols, took to a friendly tree, and set to work firing at every head or body I could see, with intent to sell my life for the very largest price I could make it command.

This had lasted for less than two minutes when my comrades, pursued by a strong body of Federal cavalry, dashed back again through the picket post.

As they came on at a full run Fitz Lee saw me, and, slackening speed slightly, he thrust out his foot and held out his hand--a cavalry trick in which all of us had been trained. Responding, I seized his hand, placed my foot upon his and swung to his crupper. A minute later a supporting company came to our assistance and the pursuing cavalrymen in blue retired.

The incident was not at all an unusual one, but the memory of it came back to me years afterwards under rather peculiar circumstances. In 1889 there was held in New York a spectacular celebration of the centennial of Washington's inauguration as president. A little company of us who had organized ourselves into a society known as "The Virginians," gave a banquet to the commissioners appointed to represent Virginia on that occasion. It so fell out that I was called upon to preside at the banquet, and General Fitzhugh Lee, then Governor of Virginia, sat, of course, at my right.

Somewhere between the oysters and the entree I turned to him and said:

"It seemed a trifle odd to me, General, and distinctly un-Virginian, to greet you as a stranger when we were presented to each other a little while ago. Of course, to you I mean nothing except a name heard in introduction; but you saved my life once and to me this meeting means a good deal."

[Sidenote: Fitz Lee]

In answer to his inquiries I began to tell the story. Suddenly he interrupted in his impetuous way, asking:

"Are you the man I took on my crupper that day down there by Dranesville?"

And with that he pushed back his plate and rising nearly crushed my hand in friendly grasp. Then he told me stories of other meetings with his old troopers,--stories dramatic, pathetic, humorous,--until I had need of General Pryor's reminder that I was presiding and that there were duties for me to do, however interesting I might find Fitzhugh Lee's conversation to be.

From that time until his death I saw much of General Lee, and learned much of his character and impulses, which I imagine are wholly undreamed of by those who encountered him only in his official capacities. He had the instincts of the scholar, without the scholar's opportunity to indulge them. "It is a matter of regret," he said to me in Washington one day, "that family tradition has decreed that all Lees shall be soldiers. I have often regretted that I was sent to West Point instead of being educated in a more scholarly way. You know I have Carter blood and Mason blood in my veins, and the Carters and Masons have had intellects worth cultivating."

I replied by quoting from Byron's "Mazeppa" the lines:

"'Ill betide
The school wherein I learned to ride.'
Quoth Charles: 'Old Hetman, wherefore so,
Since thou hast learned the art so well?'"

Instantly he responded by continuing the quotation:

"''Twere long to tell,
And we have many a league to go
With every now and then a blow;'

That is to say, I'm still Consul-General at Havana, and I have an appointment to see the President on official business this morning."

As we were sitting in my rooms at the Arlington and not in his quarters at the Shoreham, this was not a hint of dismissal, but an apology for leaving.

The conversation awakened surprise in my mind, and ever since I have wondered how many of the world's great men of action have regretted that they were not men of thought instead, and how far the regret was justified. If Fitz Lee had been educated at Yale or Harvard, what place would he have occupied in the world? Would he have become a Virginian lawyer and perhaps a judge? or what else? Conjecture in such a case is futile. "If" is a word of very uncertain significance.

The story told in the foregoing paragraphs reminds me of another experience.

When the war ended it became very necessary that I should go to Indiana with the least possible delay. But at Richmond I was stopped by a peremptory military order that forbade ex-Confederates to go North. The order had been issued in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, and the disposition to enforce it rigidly was very strong.

In my perplexity I made my way into the office of the Federal chief of staff of that department. There I encountered a stalwart and impressive officer, six feet, four or five inches high--or perhaps even an inch or two more than that--who listened with surprising patience while I explained my necessity to him. When I had done, he placed his hand upon my shoulder in comradely fashion and said:

"You didn't have anything to do with Mr. Lincoln's assassination. I'll give you a special pass to go North as soon as you please."

I thanked him and took my leave.

[Sidenote: A Friendly Old Foe]

In 1907--forty-two years later--some one in the Authors Club introduced me to "our newest member, Mr. Curtis."

I glanced at the towering form, and recognized it instantly.

"_Mr._ Curtis be hanged," I answered, "I know General Newton Martin Curtis, and I have good reason to remember him. He is the man who let me out of Richmond."

Since that time I have learned to know General Curtis well, and to cherish him as a friend and club comrade as heartily as I honored him before for his gallantry in war and for his ceaseless and most fruitful efforts since the war in behalf of reconciliation and brotherhood between the men who once confronted each other with steel between. Senator Daniel of Virginia has written of him that no other man has done so much as he in that behalf, and I have reason to know that the statement is not an exaggerated one. The kindliness he showed to me in Richmond when we were utter strangers and had only recently been foemen, inspired all his relations with the Virginians during all the years that followed, and there is no man whose name to-day awakens a readier response of good will among Virginians than does his.

XXIX

Late in the autumn of that first year of war there was reason to believe that the armies in Virginia were about to retire into the dull lethargy of winter-quarters' life, and that the scene of active war was to be transferred to the coast of South Carolina. The Federals had concentrated heavy forces there and in a preparatory campaign had seized upon the Sea Islands and their defensive works at Beaufort and elsewhere. General Lee had already been sent thither to command and defend the coast, and there seemed no doubt that an active winter campaign was to occur in that region. I wanted to have a part in it, and to that end I sought and secured a transfer to a battery of field artillery which was under orders for the South.

As a matter of fact, the active campaign never came, and for many moons we led the very idlest life down there that soldiers in time of war ever led anywhere.

But the service, idle as it was, played greater havoc in our ranks than the most ceaseless battling could have done.

For example, we were sent one day from Charleston across the Ashley river, to defend a bridge over Wappoo Cut. We had a hundred and eight men on duty--all well and vigorous. One week later eight of them were dead, eight barely able to answer to roll call, and all the rest in hospital. In the meanwhile we had not fired a gun or caught sight of an enemy.

On another occasion we encamped in a delightful but pestilential spot, and for ten days afterward our men died at the rate of from two to six every twenty-four hours.