Recollections Grave and Gay by Mrs. Burton Harrison
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Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 1843-1920. Recollections Grave and Gay Recollections Grave and Gay: Electronic Edition Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 1843-1920

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Harrison, Burton, Mrs., — 1843-1920.

Women authors, American — 19th century — Biography.

Women — Virginia — Biography.

Women — Virginia — Social life and customs.

Women — Southern States — Social life and customs.

Confederate States of America — Social life and customs.

United States — Social life and customs.

Virginia — History — Civil War, 1861-1865 — Personal narratives.

United States — History — Civil War, 1861-1865 — Personal narratives,

Confederate.

United States — History — Civil War, 1861-1865 — Women.

New York (N.Y.) — Social life and customs.

Theater — New York (State) — New York.

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RECOLLECTIONS GRAVE AND GAY BY MRS. BURTON HARRISON NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1911

COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS Published October, 1911

TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF MY BROTHER WHO AFTER LONG SUFFERING, GALLANTLY ENDURED, PASSED INTO REST AS THESE PAGES WERE GOING THROUGH THE PRESS Sea Urchins, Bar Harbor September, 1911

Page 1

RECOLLECTIONS, GRAVE AND GAY

Page 3 CHAPTER I

MY father was Archibald Cary, of Carysbrooke - all old-time Virginians loved to write themselves down as part of their parental estates - son of Wilson Jefferson Cary, a nephew of Thomas Jefferson, whose marriage with Miss Virginia Randolph had taken place at Monticello; upon which occasion the bride was given away by the master of the house, who hung around her neck a little pearl necklace sent for by him to Paris, and still treasured by her descendants. There remains also a copy of “Don Quixote” in French, lovingly inscribed by Mr. Jefferson to my grandmother.

Jefferson’s mother, it will be recalled, was Jane, daughter of Isham Randolph; and when, in 1790, Martha Jefferson married Thomas Mann Randolph, she and her husband claimed a great-great-grandfather in common. Young Randolph having lived with the Jeffersons for two years in Paris, completing his education under Mr. Jefferson’s direction at the University of Edinburgh, was entirely at home in the household of his future wife; so much so, that after their marriage he brought into it his little sister, Virginia, whose wit and charm, with her gift of making sweet music, appealed to Mr. Jefferson as strongly as did her motherless condition. Miss Randolph grew up under her sister-in-law’s devoted care, and to Mr. Jefferson owed the

Page 4 intellectual impetus he so well knew how to give to a girl’s education.

She was by him inspired with the love of letters and habit of authorship that marked her in later years, when Mrs. Cary’s novels, essays, and poems enjoyed considerable vogue. My father always spoke to me admiringly of his good mother’s literary achievements, when, as a very little girl perched upon his knee, I listened in charmed awe to the tales of a grandmamma who was a real live author, publishing every scrap of MS. as fast as she wrote it; and said by the critics to combine the style of Hannah More with a grace and humor all her own. When I tried to read her books it must be owned that I thought them rather too grave and sermon-like for human nature’s daily food. Not until many years had gone over my head did I appreciate them at their rightful value.

My father, an old-line Whig of the enthusiastic type, yet had great personal admiration for and loved to talk about his “Uncle Jefferson,” the “Father of American Democracy.” Certainly, he induced all of us, and our children after us, to look with appreciation upon Jefferson’s splendid originality of thought and fearless expression of opinion, still more upon the breadth of his interest in the whole human field of intellectual endeavor, which made him a pharos in his time. Mr. Henry Watterson has well expressed our united family opinion in saying that, after Washington and Franklin, the one clear figure in the early history of American politics is Jefferson - “a perfect Doric column.”

My son, Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, is fortunate in possessing a fine Gilbert Stuart portrait of Jefferson. Strangely enough, there is a strong likeness

Page 5 in this, as in the St. Memin profiles of Jefferson, to various members of the family in the present generations.

A crackling (alas! time-dried) letter lying before me, addressed by my father to his sister, Mrs. Gouverneur Morris, of Morrisania, “Harlaem, New York,” announces the arrival in this world of his daughter Constance, stating that “although she has red hair, he hopes if nothing happens she will not be a homely girl; of this, however, nothing can be said with certainty. The upper part of her head is very much like our mother’s, so that “should she live, I anticipate for her some of her grandmother’s talent for writing, particularly as I have great confidence in phrenology.” This I insert more as a contribution to the annals of the science of bumps than with confidence in its interest to the public.

The Carys of my father’s line had been scholars, leaders, and land-owners in the Virginia colony since 1640, and before that were well known in south-western Britain.

The head of the house is Byron Plantagenet, Viscount Falkland, a worthy inheritor of the family title of the great Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, who died on the field at Newberry for England’s glory and his own. Of late years it has been a pleasure to me to meet in my recurrent visits to London the family of the present viscount, and to be welcomed into their hospitable home, filled with portraits and relics, some of which are duplicated in our transatlantic dwellings.

Lord Falkland, whose wife was Miss Mary Reade, of New York, has a household of handsome sons and daughters, his eldest son, possessing the picturesque title of the Master of Falkland.

Page 6 Of the Carys of Virginia, a noteworthy one was Colonel Archibald Cary, of Ampthill, near Richmond, on the James, known as “Old Iron” in the American Revolution. He married a Miss Randolph of the Curls branch of that numerous family. Through these Curls Randolphs we have received a dash of Pocahontas blood, and I have found no reason to decry this attenuated strain of descent from the long-gone little Indian princess whose high fidelity and noble unselfishness made its indelible mark upon colonial history.

It must be owned we were brought up to think of our Randolph blood as a slightly menacing inheritance. “They were clever, every man and woman of them,” said a family oracle,“often brilliant, successful, fascinating - but, beware, my dear, of eccentricity! Look at your cousin, John of Roanoke! He began by being one of the most beautiful and innocent looking lads the world ever beheld, as anyone can see from that picture of him in boyhood, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and look what a miserable life he led,” etc., etc.

We did not trouble our heads much about the transmission of physical tendencies by descent in those days, and found the strange stories of our morbid kinsman very much to our taste. As leader of the Jefferson party in Congress at twenty-eight, also chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, we felt very proud of him.

We were to hear of Randolph of Roanoke in more substantial fashion just before the war began. His estate, devolving upon his insane brother, St. George, who had lived in retirement all these years, was finally divided between Randolph heirs at large, among whom my brother

Page 7 and myself were numbered. We received, to my great satisfaction, several “plums” in the way of executor’s checks, a condition pleasingly continuing until after I was married and living in New York, and then the fountain ceased to flow. Various members of the family put these odd fragments of Randolph inheritance into souvenir rings and silver tea-sets, to be handed down in memoriam of the unhappy genius, the shooting-star of the Randolph galaxy.

My father was at the time of his death just entering upon his fortieth year (a period traditionally dreaded by Cary men as likely to cut short their mortal span), living in the beautiful mountain town of Cumberland, in Maryland, where he was editor of its leading newspaper, The Cumberland Civilian. Bred in the practice of literary study, well equipped in history, a classic by descent from men educated at English universities, and owners of the best libraries in the State, he was also an ardent Whig politician, and has left printed pamphlets, speeches, and editorials breathing the fiery spirit of his creed. One of my earliest recollections was being taken as a very small child to a hotel in Cumberland to visit his idol, Henry Clay, then an aged man, who lifted me in his arms and kissed me, to my secret discomfiture, as I thought him dreadfully old and ugly. A gentleman present remarked: “Little girl, you must never forget that you started in life with a kiss and a blessing from the immortal Henry Clay.”

Of that interview I ought to have retained a silver pencil-case, which I promptly lost.

My father, when a young lawyer of three-and-twenty, had married his cousin Monimia, youngest daughter of Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the Scottish peerage, who, residing quietly on his

Page 8 estates in Virginia, had never assumed his title except when going once to England to claim an inheritance.

My grandparents sometimes took a house in Washington for the season, and there my mother, making her dיbut at seventeen, had been admired and belauded in the society of the capital. Chapman, the artist, engaged to paint “The Baptism of Pocahontas” for the rotunda of the Capitol, asked leave to introduce her into his picture as one of the two Englishwomen, their heads wrapped in scarfs, who stand directly behind the kneeling Pocahontas. My mother, at this time, made friends with Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis, he greatly extolling her beauty and inviting her to accompany them to various festivities. She remembered going to see them one day in their sitting-room at a hotel, and finding the lion still at his breakfast, in a gorgeous dressing-gown and smoking-cap, like Thackeray’s “Clarence Bulbul,” with a page-boy kneeling before the fire at his feet, toasting each mouthful of bread as demanded by his fastidious master, Willis declaring it was “the only way to make toast tolerable,” to the amusement of the little Virginia girl bred in simplicity by her austere sire.

There is a story of the wedding-journey of this very young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Cary, when they travelled, as the custom was, to New York, stopping at some Broadway hotel, where, on the day of their arrival, the bridegroom went off alone to visit Trinity Church and church-yard. She was but eighteen, had never been so far from home before, and as lunch-time came and her husband did not, feared to go down to the big dining-room alone, because people “stared at her so.” (The Rev. Dr. Philip Slaughter, a learned historian of

Page 9 Virginia, wrote to me once, “I have a vivid picture of your mother in my memory, when, as Burke said of the young Queen of France, ‘She first arose above the horizon of womanhood, and shone like the morning star, full of life and splendor and beauty.’ “) When the recreant returned, hours after, full of concern and loving apology, his excuse was that he had been copying inscriptions on the tombstones in Trinity church-yard, and had no idea how the time flew.

My antiquarian progenitor seems, indeed, to have resembled that learned lawyer of the fifteenth century, William Budaeus, who, upon his wedding-day, stole away from his bride for six hours to hold converse with the mighty dead through his books.

Of the marriage of Archibald Cary and Monimia Fairfax, the fifth between these two families, were born three children, two sons, Falkland and Clarence, and myself. My brother Falkland, who died at sixteen, was one of those rare beings sent into the world to adumbrate perfection, then cut short in the flower of youth, to the bewilderment of mortals who cannot grasp the meaning of the Creator’s scheme. As he lay after death, face and form were like one of the recumbent statues of sleeping Greeks in the galleries at Rome. All intellectual exercise was facile to him, languages ancient and modern were acquired without effort, and his literary compositions won the astonished comment of his teachers. Join to this an incomparably sweet temper and a great love of physical exercise, and his loss to his family may be understood.

My brother Clarence and I have kept together through a long life of harmonious association, varied by much travel and experience of people and places; we look back pleasantly upon our life in Cumberland, in the

Page 10 brown modern Gothic house in Decatur Street, with its tower and balconies (which must have seemed rather spectacular in the quiet old town) bought by our father for his little family. In the tower I kept a small regiment of dolls with whom I used to enact plays from a tattered old copy of Dick’s “Shakespeare,” reading all the parts myself. I was once near hating my good parents and a friend of theirs, who, unknown to me, had crept up the tower stairs to listen laughingly to one of these performances. In our nursery my brother and I made tents out of bedclothes, and told each other, successively, stories of original travel and adventure, we who had never voyaged anywhere save from “the blue bed to the brown.” The boys once had a mock trial, condemned and hung over the battlements a doll of mine, whose fate nearly broke my heart; but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. My father, very indulgent to his only girl, used to delight me with endless stories. Particularly did I relish those of the French-Indian campaign in that very neighborhood and of young Colonel Washington’s return from the disastrous venture to Mount Vernon, where our mother’s grandfather, Colonel William Fairfax of Belvoir, his son George the Tory (Washington’s old comrade in surveying), and George’s fascinating wife Sally, our father’s great-aunt, had hastened to console the young Achilles sulking in his tent by kind notes and visits.

I loved all the gossip about the Mount Vernon and Belvoir families, and felt as if they still lived in my day. Then there were Indian massacres of the most exciting sort, the scenes of occurrence in the mountain fastnesses around us; and often was I bid to travel over-sea, and hear about the mother-land and the people we sprang from there. But, affectionate to England, my father

Page 11 believed with all his heart in the ideal of our own republic and its institutions. He used to describe how its borders would go on broadening till it compassed the whole mighty continent; and once pointed out to me suddenly, in the red glow of sunset, the splendid cleft in the Alleghanies through which a river and a railway ran, westward of the town. “That, my daughter, is the gateway for the future greatness of our land,” he said, so impressively that I looked to see some actual titanic form with trailing garments sweep outward through the gorge.

My education was carried on at day-school, in the polite establishment for young ladies of a Miss Jane Kenah, where I must have done something, however inadequate, to win from her the copy of “The Lady of the Lake,” in faded red and gold, which still haunts my book-shelves, “Presented to Constance Cary, as a reward for scholarship, by her loving teacher.” I honestly do not now believe I deserved it in the least, for I did not enjoy that school, nor yet the lessons in Latin imposed upon me by my father, at the hands of the amiable and learned Rev. Hillhouse Buel, in his study at the rectory. I must have made them a misery to my instructor! And as to mathematics in general, I have always considered them an invention of the evil one!

The Rev. Mr. Buel, a distinguished father in the church, was in my eyes chiefly an incarnation of the Spirit of Ritualism in which my darling mother took strange satisfaction. His beautiful church stood on a bold bluff over the river dividing the town; our house was at a good distance on the other side; and many a time, during Lent especially, I was haled from my warm bed in the gray dawn of a winter’s morning,

Page 12 dressed hastily without breakfast (my mother fasted on Fridays in Lent till after sunset), and made to accompany her on a brisk, chill walk to matins, celebrated by the rector, in the almost empty church, for the benefit of a literal “two or three.” Once, she, I, and the celebrant were the only persons present on a stormy morning. On Sundays our family filled the first pew in the left transept, after a preceding hour of Sunday-school for the juveniles. When doctrine became too heavy for me I plaited the fringe of my mother’s embroidered shawl of China crepe, to me the most sumptuous of garments, which she would afterward find woven into as many little kinks as a darky’s wool.

The rule of our house was firm if loving. There was no weak yielding by either parent to our whims. Our pleasures were of a simple sort: long walks on the hills, flower-picking, skating in winter, and sledding over “jumps” on the snow-clad heights above our home; excursions to Flintstone, Frostburg, and the Mines; tea-parties with our little friends and, at rare intervals, a show at some town-hall, into which we walked proudly with free tickets as children of the editor. I think we heard Mme. Anna Bishop sing. My brother’s sled bore her name in crimson letters.

There was a grand triple entertainment for grown people, given by my mother and her neighbors, Mrs. Thruston and Mrs. Davidson, living diagonally opposite us on Decatur Street. The invitations, printed in silver at the office of The Civilian, bid their friends repair to Mrs. Thruston, who lived in a wide, handsome old house in a terraced garden, at eight o’clock, for the reception; to Mrs. Cary, who possessed a large drawing-room and veranda, at nine, for dancing: and to

Page 13 Mrs. Davidson (whose husband was a brother of the poetesses Lucretia and Margaret Davidson), for supper, at eleven. Allowed to sit up for this unprecedented festivity, I recall the guests assembling duly in Mrs. Thruston’s stately rooms, to sip Madeira and lemonade and taste her excellent plum-cake; then coming in a variegated string across the street to our big dancing-room, decorated with evergreen and flowers, with a band in my father’s study. Proud as I was of our place in the programme, prouder still I felt at the spectacle of my lovely young mother in “white swiss,” with bunches of scarlet geraniums in her curls and at her breast; wearing her pearls, my father’s wedding-gift; with flushed cheeks and laughing eyes and lips, leading “down the middle,” with Mr. Philip Roman, in a Virginia reel! The supper at Mrs. Davidson’s was, to my eyes, something too great and wonderful to be believed in. We and the Davidson children disgraced ourselves surreptitiously by eating impossible things, and when caught we were sent home with a swift rush and told to go straight to bed, arising next day none the worse for our indulgence. Since then, banquets in many lands have been set before us, but none could equal this! Lord Lytton, in his later days, said: “It’s a long time since I’ve been hungry, but, thank God, I am still greedy” - a consolation in a very modest way.

One of the practices of Cumberland was for the male head of the house to go to market betimes in the morning, accompanied by a servant carrying a basket into which purchases were put. One of my keenest pleasures was when, at intervals, I was allowed to go there with my father. The dim spaces in the long building lit by swinging oil lanterns; the smiling, wheedling black faces behind piles of vegetables, meats, fowls,

Page 14 fruit, and eggs; the joy of nibbling radishes, of licking honey that oozed out of its receptacle, of receiving gifts of horse-cakes from friendly merchants, of struggling through the busy crowd at my father’s coat-tails; I tried religiously not to prefer it to matins, but failed.

A vivid memory of my father is of an occasion when my busy mother, going off for one of her rare holiday jaunts to Berkeley Springs, and leaving her children and their nurse in his care, I awoke in the night crying for her and would not be consoled. No one heard me, no one answered, and I sprang out of bed and ran barefooted down the stairs. There, in the little study where he was accustomed to sit half the night (in an armchair I still possess), and make clippings from exchange journals for The Civilian, I beheld the editor buried in reading, snowed in with newspapers! At my timid note of alarm he looked up, frowned a little, then smiled tenderly, and, bounding up the steps, caught me in his arms, pressed me to his breast, carried me down to his den, and after a brief, delicious time of cosseting and soothing, carried me back to bed, and stayed by me, tender as any mother, till I slept!

With his death, our Cumberland home was broken up forever. My mother, with her three young children, was reclaimed by her own mother, who took the long journey from Alexandria to Cumberland to fetch us. It did not seem a hardship to go to live with dear Grandmamma Fairfax - sweetest and gentlest of mortals!

Once, in an outburst of infant rebellion against powers that were, I had conceived the idea of running away from Cumberland to take refuge with her. I had been told the canal passing through our town

Page 15 ran straight to her neighborhood, so I packed a preposterous little bundle, containing, among other necessaries, a tooth-brush, a prayer-book, and some lumps of sugar, and set out to walk down to the towing-path. A servant of ours, whom I always resented for the interruption to my very first adventure, espied, pursued, and captured me long before I reached the initial stage of my journey - the first lock of the canal.

Grandmamma was now a widow - the cold, stately old patriarch with silver locks and eyes of steely blue, whom I dimly recalled in earliest infancy, having gone to sleep with his grandfathers on the slope of a Virginian hill-side. He had been a wealthy man, as Virginian fortunes went, and to each of his sons - Albert, the eldest, grandfather of the present twelfth lord; Henry, of Ashgrove, a captain in the United States Volunteers, who died of exhaustion in marching through burning sun beside his soldiers in the war in Mexico, to encourage them; Orlando, the “beloved physician” of Alexandria and Richmond; and Reginald, then a lieutenant in the United States navy - he had given an estate, or its equivalent in money.

Vaucluse, the place in Fairfax County near the Theological Seminary of Virginia, had been left to the widow during her lifetime, to her son Reginald after her. And at Vaucluse our composite family lived until it was destroyed by the war between the States. When the dear chגtelaine breathed her last there, our sailor uncle declared that everything must be kept as it was, to be a happy port for him at the end of his voyages. I was very much overawed by the continual remembrance of my dead grandpapa when first we reached Vaucluse. I did not dare tell any one how I was possessed by

Page 16 an image of him when I was three years old (seen through an accidentally opened door, lying in bed in the Long Room in the wing, whether ill or merely asleep I have no idea), but the picture of that stern ivory profile against the pillow, and the long locks like spun glass beside it, haunted me for years with shuddering. There was a flight of stairs leading past his door to my mother’s room, up which I used to fly with fast-beating heart after nightfall. Also, I dreaded a long clock-case standing at the foot, which I associated with a story in a chapbook, told me by my nurse, about a corpse set on end in one of them.

My brother tells me there was a tale among the servants at Vaucluse, that my grandfather, once looking in his mirror in the Long Room, saw over his shoulder a negro woman standing, who gazed into his face appealingly. Recognizing her as a servant who had been sent away to Ashgrove, he turned to ask when she had come back and what she was doing there, and found - nobody! Two days later they heard that she had died at Ashgrove at that same hour.

Grandpapa Fairfax was a devout Swedenborgian and had his children baptized in that faith, some of them subsequently being rechristened in the Episcopal Church, by their own desire. It was said in Virginia that in early days he had covers laid at table for the departed members of his family, but for this I cannot vouch. In my time, every place at meals was filled by a very hungry set of material beings. In actual fact, the old gentleman was not so alarming as reputed.

Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, although singularly reserved in habit, was a vigorous personality. Son of the Hon. and Rev. Brian Fairfax (eighth lord and rector

Page 17 of old Christ Church in Alexandria, and life-long friend of Washington) and of Elizabeth Cary, of Ceelys, on the James, he had in boyhood made a journey to England with his Tory father in 1777, in order to make good before the House of Lords the claim of the latter to his title. In this then arduous expedition, made in raw winter weather, the father and son were assisted to pass through the lines of the American army by personal order of General Washington, who also assumed care of the wife and children left behind on the Virginian plantation. A tattered diary and letter written by little Sally Fairfax, during this time, were published by me in Scribner’s Magazine for July, 1876, under the title of “A Little Centennial Lady.” All that I could hear or glean about this quaint and charming little great-aunt was delightful to me, and a certain phrase in the letter to her sire in London, which he was to “receive owing to the Generall’s interposition” has passed into family quotation. “My love to my brother Tommy, with the hope that he will preserve the polite assurance and affable cheerfulness of a gentleman, yet not forgetting the incidents of Fairfax County.”

Of the diary I copy a few entries. Amid preparations for a Christmas dance at her father’s house, Towlston, little housewife Sally writes: “On Thursday, mama made 6 mince pies and 7 custards, 12 tarts, 1 chicking pye and 4 pudings for the ball.”

“Miss Molly Page and Mr. Perce Baillie and Mr. William Page and Mr. William Sandford, Mr. Mody and Miss Jenny, a man who lives at Colchester, Mr. Hurst, Mrs. Hurst’s husband, young Harry Gunnell, son of old William Gunnell, John Seal from the little falls, Mr. Watts and Mr. Hunter, (etc, etc, etc) these are all the gentlemen and ladies that were at the

Page 18 ball. Mrs. Gunnell brought her sucking child with her.”

“On Monday night, when papa was at Mount Vernon my aunt Fairfax” [Mrs. George William Fairfax, born Cary] “sent my muslin apron to him which she gave me when I was at Belvoir, but I did not bring it home with me, so she made Miss Polly work it for me, and in it she sent me a note, the apron is mighty pritty.”

“On Friday the 3rd, of Janna, came jon vane to undertake the building of the henhouse he got no incouragement so he went away the same way he came.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan came here granny Carty, she cut me out a short gown, and stayed all night.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan, papa went to Collo Washington’s and came home again the next Wednesday which was the 8.”

“On Friday the 3 of Jan that vile man Adam at night kild a poor cat of rage because she eat a bit of meat out of his hand and scratched it. O vile reach of new negrows if he was mine I would cut him to pieces a son of a gun a vile negrow he should be kild himself by rites.”

“On Thursday the 2 of Jan Marjerry went to washing and brought all the things in ready done on the 9 of the same month I think she was a great wile about them a whole week if you will believe me reader.”

“On Friday the 10 of Jannuary in the morning came here Danny Govens overseer for Taff, and Taff went away accordingly poor Taff I pitty him indeed, reader.”

Page 19 “On Friday the 17 of Jan I mended Tommy’s shirt from head to foot. S. F.”

“On Monday the 27 of Jan there fell an amazing snow two foot and a half deep, on Tuesday the 28 of Jan I craked a loaf of sugar, on Tuesday the 28, Adam cut down a cherry tree on Friday the 14 of Febberary, the red and white cow calved and had a red and white calf, 1772. S. FAIRFAX.”

We have, alas! no portrait of S. F. in the family gallery. My grandmother, Margaret Herbert, who afterward became brother Tommy’s wife, remembered pretty Sally, at seventeen, at the Carlyle house in Alexandria, dressed for a birthright ball, to which General and Mrs. Washington were to take her. She was now engaged to “a young Mr. Washington,” cousin or nephew of the general’s, and on this occasion the great Washington “devoted himself to her especially, leading off in a minuet with her, when they were the observed of all observers. Sally wore a dress of white net over white satin, the net trimmed with rose-colored satin leaves, a pink rose in her hair, with one white ostrich plume. It was the last ball she ever attended.” So poor, bright, quaint little Sally, “the general’s” pet of all her family, was cut off on her virgin stalk, dying before her wedding-day.

We always heard that our grandpapa mourned for her to his long life’s end.

Later in life, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, again went abroad to take possession of an inheritance coming to him from his aunt, Mrs. George William Fairfax, of Bath, England, born Sally Cary, the famous belle of

Page 20 Revolutionary times, around whom, with her two sisters, Mary, afterward Mrs. Ambler, and Elizabeth, wife of Brian Fairfax, cluster many a story, with variants, in the histories of the youthful Washington. She, with her Tory husband, finding life in the colony unendurable, had gone to live in England, passing on their voyage out the tea-laden ship that was to work havoc with king-craft in Boston harbor. Some of the silver now in daily use in my home, notably a pair of Corinthian column candlesticks with repoussי bases, was part of their table furniture. A full service of it had originally been brought to the colony by Colonel William Fairfax, of Belvoir, had voyaged back with Mr. and Mrs. George William Fairfax, was again transported to Virginia by my grandfather, used for years at Vaucluse, lay buried under the ruins of Vaucluse during the four years of war, and finally, exhumed intact, was distributed among the Fairfax heirs.

My grandmother, after the Southern custom, perhaps too often followed, was a cousin of her husband. As Margaret Herbert, of Alexandria, she had grown up in the old Carlyle house, with its heavy chimneys, dormer-windows, double balconies, and small-paned windows, now shown to tourists as the scene of Braddock’s conference, in 1755, with the five governors of the colonies about the march to Fort Duquesne. The dwelling, in the temporary absence of the family, had been lent for the purpose by her grandfather, Major Carlyle, afterward quartermaster of the expedition, and his wife, Sarah Fairfax, of Belvoir. Traditions of this dwelling, coming to me from her, embody certain visits there “to dine and lie,” of General and Mrs. Washington on the occasion of birthright balls at the City Hotel, describe the toilets and trains worn by the ladies,

Page 21 Sister Nancy’s collision with Aaron Burr on the stairway, when he put his hand on his heart with a bow and smile that (we youngsters thought) kept the lady forever unwed, and much of the same kind. The circumstance that I perhaps approved of most was that grandmamma was allowed to “come out” at fourteen!

Page 22 CHAPTER II

OUR establishment at Vaucluse now consisted of the dear and beneficent lady, its head, and her two widowed daughters with their children (six of the latter, off and on), together with an endless procession, coming and going, of aunts and cousins, who stayed as long as they found it convenient and agreeable. Now, the “connection,” as it was called, embraced a surprising number of people with the same blood in their veins, and habit had made it law that any one included in this brotherhood should be sacrosanct and free of all the house could offer as entailed upon hospitality. So the old white stucco dwelling, with its wings to right and left under the great oak trees of its lawns, went on stretching to receive guests, the stable took in their horses, the servants’ building, a little way from the pantry wing, received their attendants, and nobody ventured to think anybody was ever inconvenienced!

The two daughters of the house, my mother, and my aunt, Mrs. Hyde, took care between them of the housekeeping. Our servants were hired black people, good and faithful souls, but, thank Heaven! not slaves of ours. My grandfather Fairfax had been the first gentleman in Virginia to manumit his slaves, had each of them taught a trade, and the efficient ones sent to Liberia at his expense. The latter part of his humanitarian scheme was, needless to say, not a success, most of them writing imploring letters to “old marse” to take them back again.

Page 23 There was no farm attached to the place, only gardens, a chicken-yard, orchard, and dairy, from which the table was supplied with country dainties. In the rooms were assembled the flotsam of family furnishings accumulated from other homes in England and Virginia, Towlston, Belvoir, and Ashgrove. We had on the walls a few interesting old Fairfax portraits: a “Percy, Earl of Northumberland,” a “Parliamentary General,” a Lady Fairfax with a busk, carrying a long feather in her hand, Roundheads and Cavaliers; and in the secretary many old parchments and a pedigree illuminated in Elizabethan days, with a land transfer of the date of Richard Coeur de Lion. The drawing-room was large and bright, with many windows, all furnished and curtained in crimson damask. A large open grate held in winter a fire of logs and lumps of coal making a royal blaze; upon the mantle were girandoles and ostrich eggs, with some Dresden cups and saucers beautifully painted with wreaths of blossoms. In an alcove to one side were shelves of books, mostly old English volumes, saffron-hued and musty, that when opened were apt to send little queer bloodless insects scuttling out of them. There I sat (oftenest upon my foot) poring over the world of joy I got from this fragment of a library. When not thus employed, I was out-of-doors, scouring the woods, climbing trees, riding horses to water, wading streams, and picking wild flowers. Except for my cousin, Meta Hyde, younger than I, a big-eyed quaint creature whom her brothers teased and petted alternately, I was the only girl child at Vaucluse. Of the young men and boy cousins, passing in and out of the house, Vaucluse sent fourteen or fifteen to the war. They always seemed to me to illustrate what Colonel Lambert told Harry Warrington about the Persians. “They can ride and speak the

Page 24 truth.” The wonder is I was not spoiled utterly by their setting me on a pinnacle and doing all I asked, big or little, in or out of season.

It was then decided by my mother that I could no longer roam and ride, or go shooting with the boys; so, after a long foreign correspondence, a French governess, Mademoiselle Adami, appeared upon the scene and was instructed to keep with me always in my walks abroad. Poor lady! It must be owned that she had her hands full, that I writhed under her mincing conventionalities of social doctrine, and that the boys played many a welcome trick on her, including the offering of persimmons from a tree in the pasture upon which frost had not yet laid its redeeming spell. But she knew how to teach, and in school-hours I was interested, and learned to like reading in French, which I have kept up unremittingly all my life since.

Washington, our chief shopping-place, eight miles distant, was usually attained from Vaucluse in the family coach drawn by two highly groomed chestnuts with long frizzled tails, in which we jogged over the Long Bridge to have our daguerreotypes taken at Whitehurst’s, to order bonnets of Miss Wilson, and to eat ices at Gautier’s. To keep us children quiet on the drive, so that the elders could talk coherently, it was grandmamma’s practice to smuggle into the carriage Scotch cakes, Everton toffee, and rosy apples. While we nibbled and munched (especially if the draw on the bridge were off and some slow-sailing Potomac craft were pursuing its dignified course down the tawny stream) they chatted, and oh! of what interesting things! Of the doings at Queen Victoria’s court, which these British lined ladies dearly loved to discuss, of Washington social affairs and notabilities, of the dear bishop our neighbor and matters

Page 25 of the church in Virginia, of books read, and of events, ancient and modern, in families who somehow or other seemed always to be of kin to ours! As the war came on the talk grew more solemn. They none of them wanted secession, and were waiting to see what Colonel Robert Lee would do. Sometimes mademoiselle was told off to conduct us upon improving visits to the dentist and various government buildings, especially the Patent Office, while my mother and aunt made calls upon old friends. Sometimes we children, too, were taken to call upon long-suffering acquaintances. At the corner of I Street and Sixteenth stood a brick house, overgrown with ivy, around which was a pleasant old garden. Here lived a kinswoman, Mrs. Richard Cutts, and in residence with her was her mother, Mrs. Hackley, sister of my grandmother Cary. My obeisance accomplished to Aunt Hackley, I generally made all speed to the garden in company with our little Cutts cousins, Gertrude (now Mrs. Moorfield Storey, of Boston) and her sister Lucia. My first glimpse of the radiant Adelaide Cutts, afterward Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas, was in this garden, and the vision smote my heart-strings with delight. And, strange to say, in part of the same garden was afterward built the house where I have now pitched my tent, “a day’s march nearer home.”

My grandmother Fairfax had a daughter, Mrs. Irwin, living in Washington with her husband and two children; so that we had always a pied א terre for visits and stops-over to see special sights. To this kind aunt I owed many happinesses as I grew older, and from her house, years after, I went to my first ball in Washington at the house of my present next-door neighbor - still living in the same spacious mansion, with its wide garden

Page 26 shadowed on my side by a noble maple, in which, in early spring, to perch numberless migrating birds, including the cardinal grosbeak, who taps at my windowpane and flits through the branches, revealing his scarlet majesty before the leaves are out.

Better even than our visits to the seat of government, I loved those to quiet, dreamy old Alexandria, where every one of the historic cobblestones of King Street (now mercifully broken up, and relaid under a couch of asphalt) had some family chronicle to tell me. Because I may not be able so well to express the spirit of the place as it then appealed to me, I venture to quote here the opening pages of a book of my short stories, called “Belhaven Tales,” chiefly published in the Century Magazine. Into that collection crept, without my knowing it, so much of autobiography that I have a kindly feeling even for its faults.

“In the quiet, grass-grown town of Alexandria, first named Belhaven, situated upon the lower bank of the Potomac, in Virginia, might have been perceived, just before the outbreak of the war between the States, a faint flavor of early colonial days lingering like the scent of rose-leaves in an old-time China jar.

“To begin with the streets - what a Tory smack in their names! - King, Prince, Duke, Royal, Queen, Princess, Duchess. Odd enough in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon - nay, under the very shadows, as it were, of the great dome of the National Capitol! At the time referred to, enjoyment for the greater part of a century of the blessings of political enfranchisement had not deprived some Alexandrians of a certain relish for the affairs of the English court. They liked to read the Illustrated London News, and to obtain correct information about the queen’s walks with the youthful

Page 27 royalties and the queen’s drives, attended by Ladies X, Y, and Z. Had they not been fed upon the traditions of an English ancestry, as upon the toothsome hams, the appetizing roe-herrings, of their famous market-place? The Georgian era of tea-drinking and tambour, of spangles and snuffboxes, of high play and hair-powder, represented to them the Golden Age in the fortunes of their families of which every vestige must be guarded jealously. As children they had stood on tiptoe to study the lineaments of Great-grandaunt Betty, hanging in the fly-specked frame somewhere near the ceiling, and had been eager to hear how she had been toasted at Mayfair supper-tables or had danced the gavotte at a Ranelagh ball. Yonder beetle-browed warrior in a voluminous wig was a general in Queen Anne’s time, before he condescended to his present station above the sideboard. The beautiful youth in armor, slender and graceful, with the fiery eyes, fought for King Charles against the Roundheads, never dreaming that he would come across the seas to find his niche in a staid Virginian sitting-room! In this wainscoted parlor, where the light comes through small, greenish panes of glass veiled with ivy branching from stems knit in a fibrous mass upon the outer wall, had great-grandmamma, dressed in her satin-paduasoy (‘You may see a piece of it upon your aunt Prunella’s pin-cushion, my dear!’), her hose with silver clocks, stood to receive General Braddock, on occasion of his first visit to the town.”

In walking through the streets of Alexandria to-day, one sees residences keeping up the traditions of prosperous hospitality. Enclosed within high-walled gardens, where the Southern sun coaxes from mellow soil jasmines yellow and white, roses in prodigal variety, honeysuckle and other sweet-smelling things, the owners

Page 28 of these homes dwell year after year, unambitious of change, gazing contentedly from afar upon that “microcosm on stilts, yclept the great world.” It is the business quarter of the town that strikes most forcibly the visitor from one of the present centres of American commerce. From this old-time seat of Virginian custom, the “fret and fever of speculation” have forever fled. In the line of warehouses along the wharves the quick “pulse of gain” has ceased to beat. The vessels lying at anchor must be haunted by ghostly crews; they give no sign of life. The steamboat that plies her way between Washington and Alexandria seems to approach the wharf cautiously, as if fearing to awake a slumberer. Even the fishing industry - for the beautiful river has not ceased to yield her tribute - appears to move but languidly. All this has its delightful aspect; and he who would view a lotus-eater in his paradise should watch an Alexandrian darky dangling his legs over the worn beams of the dock under pretence of fishing - listening to the lap of water against the green and shiny piles, and droning away the livelong afternoon until the level sun, which gleams fiery red upon the broken windows of the warehouse at his back, begins to stir in him vague thoughts of corn-pone browning on the cabin hearth at home.

One winter of my early youth spent by us at the Mansion House in King Street, Alexandria, I used to look out, across the way, at a large old brick mansion with closed window shutters wearing a melancholy air of decay. When I asked who lived there, I was told that little girls should not ask questions and I had better run away and play. One day I espied, descending the high steps, the oddest little figure carrying a pitcher in her hand. She was a tiny old lady dressed in an “umbrella”

Page 29 skirt, with white stockings and black kid slippers, a fantastic scarf around her shoulders, and, to crown all, a poke-bonnet covered with a sprigged black lace veil. Very quietly, with perfect dignity of demeanor, she tripped over to a pump in the neighborhood, filled her pitcher, and returned inside the dismal doorway. Even the street boys failed to jeer at her, and passers-by looked on respectfully. Then, to stay my eager curiosity, her story was told to me. She was a harmlessly mad kinswoman, who lived alone with her equally stricken sister in their old family home, the only survivors of a large household. For some time my grandmother had taken care of their needs, allowing them to remain in the home which they pitifully prayed to keep. Their handsome father, son of an Irish family of ancient lineage who had come to Virginia, it was said, to make good his losses on the Curragh race-track at Kildare, was reputed to be under ban by the priests in his native land because of his offence against the church of pulling down a chapel on the estate and using the stones to build a banquet-hall! Arrived in the New World, he had at first prospered, married an heiress, and had many children. But in the course of years everything went wrong with him; debts and his dissipation wrecked his wife’s fortune, every son born to them died by violence or accident; finally, they two passed out of life, leaving these hapless daughters overpowered by their sorrows. One of the sons, with his little boy, died by accidental poisoning at the hands of the family doctor while on a visit to Mount Vernon, and they are both buried there; another, styled “Singing Billy” by the townspeople, having “a voice like an angel heard above all others in Christ Church choir,” was, with his brother, swept off by a sudden pestilence of cholera in the

Page 30 town. Still another was killed by lightning; and one, his exact fate foretold by his negro “mammy” in Alexandria, perished at the hands of Indians on the Western plains.

While I was away at boarding-school in Richmond came tidings that the two afflicted sisters had been finally removed to a sanitarium. The younger, to her life’s end, wore around her neck a locket she would allow nobody to open, and it was buried with her. Those of her kindred who went through the forsaken house collecting their scattered belongings described a scene like a page from Dickens’s “Great Expectations” - laces, cashmeres, slippers, gowns, heaped in dusty corners, cobwebs everywhere. Thus was wrought out the priest’s ban in Ireland, and so ended a hapless family.

Our first place of rest in going to Alexandria was always my uncle’s old home in Cameron Street, called “the Fairfax House” on modern post-cards. A hundred associations cluster around that house, with its brick-walled garden and semicircular front steps. There my uncle and his wife exhaled the kindness and fragrance of their truly Christian lives; there their son, the heroic young Randolph Fairfax, was born; there my brother Falkland died, a tragedy in my young life; and there I was one day to be, for the space of twenty-four hours, a prisoner of war.

The house of the two old maiden ladies everybody in our connection called “my aunts” was another, but less popular, resort of our early youth. It had rather a grim exterior, we thought, an impression intensified by our being bidden, before entering, to lay aside any flowers or sweet calycanthus shrubs we might happen to be carrying. It was in King Street, not far

Page 31 from the river, where, in old times, the lawns in that part of town went down to the water’s edge, and the owners of ships could see their cargoes coming safe to port, with everything ordered in England, from silken paduasoys to a coach for driving “four.”

It used to be hard for me to picture my elder great-aunt as a “little pet” of family letters, on a visit to Madam Washington at Mount Vernon, learning from her to make a quilt, or perched on a taboret to sing “Ye Dahlian God” at General Washington’s request.

But she left that quilt to me, so I know the tale was true. She was rather an alarming old lady, we all thought. Her stern Roman profile resembled that of a warrior on a bas-relief, her hawk’s eye seemed to be searching for juvenile depravity. At Vaucluse she would sometimes so alarm shy theological students who came to call that they hardly spoke at all during the visit.

The other aunt was warm, generous, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, a walking encyclopedia of Virginian genealogy. She would “comfort us with apples,” also gingercakes, and send us out into the backyard to pick up the little pipes that fell from a great sycamore tree shading it. Sometimes she let us go upstairs to visit a cousin who lived with them, who rarely went abroad on account of her unusual size. This was a very clever, pungent lady, whom we credited with having read all the books in the world, and who bred canary birds.

After “my aunts” came to reside at Vaucluse with “Sister Peggy,” I cannot think of its long, cheerful living-room without seeing on either side of the fireplace a large beaded mahogany armchair containing an ancient dame poring over books and newspapers, which they kept stuffed around their persons as they sat. They

Page 32 read, from morning until night, grave books, and all sorts and conditions of fiction, from Madame d’Arblay to George Eliot, when not talking about people who seemed to me coeval with the flood.

At the outbreak of the war, when my mother and Mrs. Hyde elected to leave Vaucluse and go to the scene of fighting in order to be near their volunteer soldiers and serve as nurses if desired, “my aunts” declined to move elsewhere. They were not afraid of armies, nor indeed of anything but mice. They stayed till the place was taken as a United States camp, and when courteously informed by the officer in command that they must go into Alexandria, for which purpose the war-carriage, an ambulance, stood in waiting at the door, the older sister positively refused to move of her own accord; and there she sat defying them, fire in her glance, iron in her veins, till two soldiers between them lifted her, chair and all, and bore her forever from the chimney-corner of Vaucluse.

The aged gentlewomen, finding refuge in the Cameron Street house, lived there during the remainder of the war. They will be kindly remembered by many Alexandrians of the old rיgime, as by their numerous kin. The older lady, unconscious of her surroundings for some time before the end, would not rest without books and newspapers literally covering her in bed. She bequeathed to me an interesting mezzotint, now hanging in my library, of General Nathanael Greene, presented by Washington to her father, and the counterpane of transfer work made by her at Mount Vernon; one of the Italian cotton toiles de Gךnes, so familiar to tourists on the Riviera, cut out and “buttonholed” upon a heavier background, presenting to view a large tree with flowers fruit and birds, all at once upon its branches.

Page 33

Our neighborhood was always deeply interested in what concerned the Lees, of Arlington, who lived in elegance and comfort not far away. Colonel Lee’s splendid, soldierly figure was a mark for general approval when, on his visits home, he rode into Alexandria to visit his old friends. What he said upon subjects of national and civic interest was apt to lead other opinions always. His wife, a daughter of Mr. George Washington Parke Custis, “the old man eloquent,” was of kin to us through her mother, a Randolph, and we knew all their boys and girls. I remember Mary Custis Lee, on horseback, accompanied by her little brother “Robbie,” on his white pony Santa Anna, riding up on Sunday to service at the chapel of the Theological Seminary; two handsome and gallant figures they seemed to lookers-on. Mildred Lee was my dear friend, and during a tour we made together in the Dolomites, a few years before her death, we loved to conjure up old Arlington and Vaucluse reminiscences. In one of our walks near Cortina, she ventured into an enclosure where a couple of fierce dogs bounded out, barking, upon her; and I, from the road, beheld Mildred go forward to meet them without flinching, reducing both assailants to the condition of fawning upon her knees, she, absolutely calm, with no sign of the quickening of a pulse. The peasant who ran to her aid was astonished out of his wits; but he probably had never heard of General Lee, and was unaware of the transmission of hereditary traits.

The Augustin Washingtons, of Mount Vernon, were rather too far away from Vaucluse for us to see much of them, for our Fairfax County roads were then, as now, not inviting to sociability except on horseback. I had a delightful visit at Mount Vernon in childhood, and after the place became the property of the Women

Page 34 of America, our cousin, Mr. Upton Herbert, an intimate friend of the late owner, was appointed to be resident superintendent. The most distinguished occasion I can remember at Mount Vernon was that of the visit of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Henry Holland, Lord Lyons, and others, with President Buchanan and his beautiful niece, Miss Harriet Lane, who came down by water and roamed freely about the old house and grounds. I had the glory of standing by a box hedge in the garden and presenting to his royal highness a basket of flowers picked from bushes traditionally said to have been planted by Mrs. Washington. Of this event I chiefly remember the young prince’s charming manner in receiving the token, at once consigned to one of his followers to carry, and my own desperate anxiety lest my leghorn “flat,” crowned with a wreath of feather flowers brought by my sailor uncle from Madeira, should have gone askew during my previous wild races through the garden.

On a high bluff commanding beautiful reaches of the Potomac, just below Mount Vernon, from which estate it was divided by a creek called Dogue Run, stand in a tangled wilderness of trees and shrubs, relics of the foundation walls of old Belvoir House, burnt down during the Revolution. This dwelling, familiar in Virginia annals as the home of Colonel William Fairfax, of Yorkshire, collector of the king’s customs on the Potomac, and the frequent stopping-place of the bachelor Lord Fairfax of Greenway Court, has an especial interest to patriotic Americans in that it was the second home and beloved resort of Washington in youth. Of Belvoir, he himself writes that the happiest hours of his life were spent there.

Page 35

My childhood was fed upon stories of old Belvoir and its inmates - the master, Washington’s mentor in the art of war - his son, the young soldier who went away from there to find his death with Montcalm before Quebec - he to whom Wolfe said, “Young man, when we come into action, remember the name you bear” - and the sailor boy Thomas who went down in his majesty’s ship Harwich fighting the French off Bourdaloue in the East Indies. Anne, the oldest daughter, married Lawrence Washington, and became the first mistress of Mount Vernon. George was Washington’s comrade in the surveying tour in the Western wilderness. Hannah became Mrs. Warner Washington, and last, not least, was Brian, my great-grandsire, subsequently eighth lord. I cannot remember when I did not wish that the family would recreate the traditions of this old home. But Hygeia has been against it, for the old bogie of chills and fever to which our Virginian forebears bowed down so meekly - simply recording its annual return in their diaries, taking quinine or its equivalent and quaking without remonstrance - has never been banished from the spot.

My son, Fairfax Harrison, has come nearer than any other to realizing my dreams, for he has established a new Belvoir in Fauquier County, Virginia, upon land formerly belonging to the Greenway Court properties; and upon his library table lies the original “visitors’ book” of the Revolutionary home, a copy of Thoresby’s “Antiquities of Yorkshire,” which, he had the luck to secure from England. Sold with other effects of the Fairfaxes at Bath, England, this interesting volume had for years been in the hands of the antiquarian collector, B. F. Stevens, Esq., in London, where a friend found it, subsequently waiving his right as a purchaser in

Page 36 favor of my son. Upon its fly-leaves are written many names of the frequenters of old Belvoir, appended to “sentiments,” mostly in French or Latin. Three great-great grandsons of the original owner recently inscribed themselves on its time-worn record, headed by the present American-born Lord Fairfax, who, in this twentieth century, has become an English subject, his title confirmed to him by the House of Lords in November, 1908.

As regards the pronunciation of the name “Belvoir,” it is probable it was in early days pronounced “Beever,” like the seat of the dukes of Rutland, who were akin to the English Fairfaxes. Colonel Harrison Dodge, the representative of the national owners of Mount Vernon, who is nothing if not exact, so pronounces it, but the moderns of our family give it the French sound.

In the small dining-room at Mount Vernon may be seen a fine old iron fireback, reclaimed from the ruins of Belvoir, bearing the lion crest and motto, “Fare Fac.”

In our part of the county everything clerical was under the immediate domination of the Theological Seminary. We and other neighborhood families sat on Sundays in the chapel of that institution (my grandmother reserving two front pews in the left-hand transept for herself and guests), the main part of the nave being filled by the students and the high-school boys. Well do I remember when those pews of ours were filled to overflowing by devout female worshippers from Vaucluse - mothers, aunts, and cousins who would not have shirked attendance for the world. They made nothing of two services and two sermons a day, and if the great and learned Dr. Sparrow

Page 37 chanced to be in the pulpit, those sermons were no twenty-minute screeds! Other professors beloved in our circles were the Rev. Doctors Packard and May; and at a little distance to the left, going down the hill where in my time blue iris bordered the roadside, lived dear Bishop Johns, genial, lovable, and strong mentally, as befits a father in the church. It was the custom of our neighborhood to give from time to time tea-parties to the clergy and seniors among the students. On these evenings my grandmother’s table was spread with her fairest damask, the best silver, cut glass, and a service of early Derby china, deep lapis lazuli blue, bordered with gilt, with pink eglantine in the centre. A few cups and plates of this china deck my shelves to-day. Among the dainties heaped on the table one may be sure broiled chicken and thinnest slices of pink ham were not absent; nor hot Maryland biscuit, thin biscuit, every kind of biscuit, fresh butter, and a bewildering variety of preserves, including segments of watermelon rind carved like lace work, with peaches and quinces in amber syrup, for the clergy always liked Vaucluse preserves. Next followed a course of waffles, crisp and golden brown, over which one was asked to shake, out of the sifter of Queen Anne silver, a shower of sugar and cinnamon combined. To these reflections, in their turn came Messrs. Phillips Brooks and Henry Potter (already in their student days a head higher intellectually than the average of their fellows, and much in demand by Hill hostesses) with many another subsequent dignitary of the church. With the Hyde children and Clarence, I used to peep agape through the pantry door as it opened for the passage of successive good things, and wonder if the clericos intended to eat all night!

Page 38

Among our neighbors were the McGuires, of Howard, he the reverend rector of the Episcopal High School, she a delightful whole-souled woman, born Brockenborough, who afterward wrote a lively chronicle of war days; the families of the professors I have named, and the household of General Samuel Cooper, then United States adjutant-general in Washington, who had a country home, Cameron, on the hill. Mrs. Cooper was a daughter of George Mason, of Gunston Hall, and sister-in-law of General Lee’s brother, Admiral Sydney Smith Lee. She had two daughters, Maria (Mrs. Wheaton), and Jennie, a great friend of mine. The Coopers, who drove to service in a two-horse carriage with a smart coachman, took the pas over Vaucluse in this respect, since we either walked or drove ourselves in a one-horse rockaway, our servants all having holiday on Sunday, it seemed to us.

Near Cameron lived Miss Emily Mason, with her widowed sister, Mrs. Rowland, agreeable and cultivated women both, with Mrs. Rowland’s two daughters and two sons. Miss Mason, since widely known for her noble service as an army nurse as well as for her literary works and compilations, was an especial spot of sunshine on “the Hill.” She died in Georgetown, very recently, at an advanced and green old age.

Commodore French Forrest, with his gentle wife and his son, the late Rev. Douglas Forrest, once of the C. S. A., lived at Clermont. It was an attractive house, with wonderful box hedges and calycanthus bushes of unusual size. I remember a dance given by handsome Mrs. Forrest, when I wore a white “book-muslin,” with my hair glued to my head with bandoline, then plaited in sixteen-strand braids coiled in a basket low upon the neck, in which were inserted

Page 39 white cape-jasmines set in rose-geranium leaves. We danced hard till daybreak, and I drove home in a buggy with one of the older male cousins without dreaming of a chaperon.

Near Vaucluse lived our cousin Arthur Herbert, of Muckross (he was like the youngest son of grandmamma’s household), who was to go off to war as captain in the Seventeenth Regiment of Alexandria Volunteers, and after four years of hard fighting, through almost every battle of the army of northern Virginia, come back as colonel, with a record of many gallant deeds, and settle again in his old home. He found the crest of the hill on which his former house had stood bare of everything - dwelling, trees, fences, and outhouses all gone; but a United States fort built upon the site had left behind casemates of solid masonry, serving as fine cellars for the new house. Colonel Herbert married Miss Alice Gregory, of Petersburg, and, with their family, has continued to reside at Muckross - named for the original home of the Herberts near Killarney, in Ireland.

Farther up in the county abode Mrs. Fitzhugh, of Ravensworth, the aunt by marriage of Mrs. Lee, of Arlington, to whose second son, General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, she bequeathed her ancient estate. A visit I once made to Ravensworth, from Mr. Upton Herbert’s neighboring “Bleak House,” has been always remembered pleasantly. When my cousin Upton was nearly eighty, he used to make his visits to Ravensworth riding upon a fiery young unbroken colt, and the Lee family would send a mounted servant after him when he returned to Bleak House, with orders not to show himself, but to keep the old gentleman in sight.

At Ravensworth, to-day, lives the widow of General W. H. Fitzhugh Lee (once handsome Miss Bolling, of

Page 40 Petersburg), with her sons, and General Custis Lee, who, dispossessed of Arlington, has since made his home with his late brother’s family.

Time glided by peacefully in our sweet old home, broken only by the necessary severing of links in the chain of life that, by Heaven’s mercy, close again to give us courage to go on. The early death of my brother Falkland, was followed in a few years by that of my gentle grandmother. We had few excitements; occasionally we went to the Springs, to make visits at Charlottesville, Baltimore, or Washington, and to the country-houses of friends. I visited sometimes at the Vineyard, the home of Mr. Conway Robinson, the learned Virginian jurist, near Washington. His son, Leigh Robinson, a brilliant graduate of the University of Virginia, fought through the war in the Army of Northern Virginia, and has since been at the bar in Washington. I had one journey, only, to the North, to visit the home of my aunt and uncle, the Gouverneur Morrises, of Morrisania. Not only did it seem wonderful to be penetrating to such a far-away region as New York, but I had heard such interesting stories about Morrisania: How it was built upon the site of his earlier home by Gouverneur Morris, member of the convention which adopted the Constitution of the United States, senator, and minister to France during the Reign of Terror - who had known familiarly all the great actors of that awful drama, and the grandees of other countries. How he had come back to live at Morrisania, bringing a ship-load of relics from old palaces in France, mirrors, tapestries, gilded chairs and couches, books, a rare dessert service of old Sטvres, with forks and spoons of solid gold - and had put all these inside the oak-panelled

Page 41 walls of his home on the Harlem Kills, where they still remained. How he had entertained Talleyrand, the Jerome Bonapartes, Tom Moore, and all the visiting celebrities as well as statesmen of his day. How his romantic marriage at sixty with Miss Anne Randolph, of Virginia, had occurred there, his wife having a year later given him his only son, the then master of the house. How this second Gouverneur had in his turn married a Virginian lady, a first cousin. How when Grandmamma Cary went to see her nephew at Morrisania, in the early days after her sister’s death, they would drive and drive, and be always, like the Marquis of Carabas, upon his own land! Now the estate had come down to forty acres surrounding the delightful, mellow old house. Piece by piece, my uncle had sold it for stations on the Hartford and New Haven railways, or else the great encroaching monster of New York had swallowed it by bits.

Naturally, I was eager to visit there, and it was a time of unalloyed pleasure with my uncle and aunt and their family of boys and girls near my own age.

But nothing whispered to me that one day, after a terrible war that should destroy my own home, I would be married from Morrisania. And yet this was to be!

I am making no attempt to record chronologically the events of my modest experience in childhood. I am simply writing down, as they drift to me out of the mists of memory, things about the people most familiar to me, thinking it may interest readers as a page torn from old-time chronicles of American social life before the war. The two or three years after the reign of my French governess came to an end, were spent by me in Richmond at the boarding-school of M. Hubert Pierre Lefebvre. As a rule, narratives of boarding-school life

Page 42 are more interesting to the teller than to hearers, and I will only say that the experience broadened my horizon in introducing to me types of girls from the higher classes of society all over the South, and convincing me that the surrounding slave service was inspiring neither to the energy of body nor independence of ideas I had been taught to consider indispensable. Many of these pretty, languid creatures from the far Southern States had never put on a shoe or stocking for themselves; and the point of view of some about owning and chastising fellow-beings who might chance to offend them was abhorrent to me. But they all came out grandly during the war, and after it.

In some mysterious way I had drunk in with my mother’s milk - who inherited it from her stern Swedenborgian father - a detestation of the curse of slavery upon our beautiful Southern land. Then, of course, omnivorous reader that I was - I had early found and devoured “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “that mischievous, incendiary book,” as some of our friends called it. When the thunderbolt of John Brown’s raid broke over Virginia I was inwardly terrified, because I thought it was God’s vengeance for the torture of such as Uncle Tom.

I was on a visit to my aunt, Mrs. Irwin, in Washington, following Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, while yet arose in many households spirited discussion concerning the trend of national events. We young people had not waked up to a full understanding of the issues involved, nor had become the fierce partisans of after days. When, therefore, my aunt’s husband (who remained a supporter of the Union during the war) insisted that, as an epoch in life, I should be taken to see the new President, I went with him to one of the levees at the White House. A terrible crush of people, it

Page 43 seemed to me, of all sorts and conditions, foreign ministers preceding backwoodsmen in flannel shirts and Sunday coats, great ladies of the administration, in line with struggling women and children hardly dressed or kempt for festal occasion. That was the reception where the curtains had pieces cut out of them for souvenirs by the backwoodsmen, who, it was said, swarmed to Washington in the wake of the “man of the people.” Budding secessionist although I was, I can distinctly remember that the power of Abraham Lincoln’s personality then impressed itself upon me for a lifetime. Everything faded out of sight beside the apparition of the new President, towering at the entrance of the Blue Room. He held back the crowd a minute, while my hand had a curious feeling of being engulfed in his enormous palm, clad in an ill-fitting white kid glove. He said something kind to his youthful visitor, and over his rugged face played a summer lightning smile. We passed on, and I saw him no more till he drove past our house in captured Richmond, in an ambulance, with his little son upon his knee.

Page 44 CHAPTER III

AND now the war-clarion blew, the clans were all alert, and every male creature belonging to us was straining for the fray. As Vaucluse lay in the track of probably advancing armies, my mother and aunt decided to send their younger children out of harm’s way. Accordingly, to my despair, I was packed off with my brother Clarence and my little cousin Meta Hyde to stop with a relation at Millwood, in Clarke County, Virginia. Consolation, in the shape of lovely surroundings, bountiful hospitality, visits to such places as Saratoga, Carter Hall, The Moorings, Annfield, etc., made the May days dance along, until we were suddenly confronted with the news that Vaucluse had been forsaken by my mother and aunt, who had driven away by night in their own carriage, their destination the immediate neighborhood of Manassas Junction, where the Southern troops were massing.

One of the letters from my mother of this date told how at the last moment before leaving Vaucluse, having no way of despatching the silver to a safety-vault in Washington or Alexandria, she had undertaken to bury it in the cellar of the house. Aided by a young nephew who was to go on the morrow to volunteer at Manassas, and a faithful old negro gardener, who died soon afterward, they worked half the night (she holding a lantern) till pits were made large enough to contain two large travelling trunks, into which the silver

Page 45 had been hastily packed. The pits filled in and rubbish strewn over them, my mother got into the carriage before daybreak and drove away to the Confederate lines.

Four years later, the house having been destroyed by incendiaries, all the trees on the place cut down for breastworks, and the site used for a United States camp during many months, she came back to her home, accompanied by men with spades and picks. Save for slight depressions in the grass, there was no token of where the house had stood, and many bewildered moments were spent in searching for it. Some hours followed while the men toiled, and my mother sat on the ground and looked on, amid gathering tears. Any idle soldier prodding the ground might have struck the boxes, she argued, and there was little hope. Just as she was about giving the order to stop work, one of the men cried out, holding up a teaspoon black as jet! Soon the earth was covered with dark objects from around which the boxes had rotted. Candelabra, urn, tea-set, tankards, bowls, dishes, and the complete service of small silver were recovered, not a salt-spoon missing! Sent to Galt’s, in Washington, for treatment, they were soon restored to pristine brilliancy.

In Mrs. Judith Brockenborough McGuire’s “Diary of a Southern Refugee” is found the following, under date of July 30, 1862:

“Vaucluse, too, the seat of such elegant hospitality, the refined and dearly loved home of the Fairfax family, has been levelled to the earth, fortifications thrown up across the lawn, the fine old trees felled, and the whole grounds, once so embowered and shut out from public gaze, now laid bare and open - Vaucluse no more!”

Page 46

If we were to join her at all, wrote my mother from Bristoe Station, it must be now, as who knew when the military lines might shut us out? She warned me in eloquent phrase that our sylvan paradise at Millwood must be exchanged for a poor little roadside tavern on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, treeless, shabby, crowded to excess with officers’ families, under burning sun all day, no ice for rather muddy water, no fruit, the plainest of fare, and nowhere to walk but up and down the railway track. Per contra, the camp containing our boys was but five miles away; we should get all the army news direct; and day after day would see trains thundering by, full of eager soldiers, thrilling and shouting with joy that they were so near the goal! When the battle came we should be nearest it, to do our best for them. If our troops were to be driven back - why, then, we would “take our chance!”

We went. By lumbering stagecoach down the peaceful Shenandoah Valley, clad in the radiancy of summer foliage, by way-train here and there, passing “the Junction,” the centre of all hopes and thoughts, the cradle of the future Army of Northern Virginia - arriving safely and gladly at Bristoe to “take our chance” with the others.

The month that elapsed before the first battle of the war, on July 18, 1861, was one in which I woke up to the strongest feeling of my young life. My mother saw her only remaining son, aged fifteen, looking several years younger, go into service as a marker in an Alexandria regiment. She sewed for him, with the neatest of stitches, white gaiters, and a “havelock” for his cap - these afterward abandoned by authority as too shining marks for riflemen - tears dropping now and then upon her handiwork, but never a thought of telling

Page 47 him he should not go. All about me were women ready to give their all. I realized that love of country can mean more than love of self.

In the family carriage, sold later as a superfluity of luxury to refugees and hospital nurses, we drove to several impromptu entertainments at Camp Pickens, during the month of waiting the enemy’s advance. What young girl’s heart would not beat quicker in response to such experience? There were dinners cooked and served to us by our soldier lads, spread upon rough boards, eaten out of tin plates and cups amid such a storm of rollicking gayety and high hope that war seemed a merry pastime. In the infancy of war, the Louisiana chieftain, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, of ancient Creole family, was distinctly looked upon as the future leader of the Confederacy. His name was upon all lips, his praise on every breeze that blew. Some early war rhymester wrote verses, of which the refrain was:

“Beau canon, Beauregard! Beau soldat, Beauregard!

Beau sabreur! Beau frappeur! Beauregard, Beauregard!”

Needless to say that to be received with visitors’ honors at his headquarters was a source of undying pride. We met there the lamented Brigadier-General Bartow, killed at the first battle of Manassas; General Longstreet, who in those days, before he lost several children at once by scarlet fever, was rollicking and jolly always, looking, as his aid, Moxley Sorrel, afterward said of him: “Like a rock of steadiness when sometimes in battle the world seemed flying to pieces”; and many another destined to high fame. There were drills, dress parades, and reviews, viewed from the headquarters tents of great generals. In all our dreams

Page 48 sounded the blare of trumpets, the roll of drums. And so till the morning of July 17, when word came that our troops were moving forward!

Now knew we the rude reality! Those women and girls and children left at Bristoe, who, on the 18th, spent all day on the railway tracks, straining eyes and ears in the direction of the belt of woodland above which arose columns of gun smoke, hearing the first guns of the war as distinctly as one hears a fog-horn on an Atlantic liner, had mostly all they loved best in the fight. It seemed eternal, that sullen roar of artillery, that crackle of fire-arms. And who should say how it was coming out? We could not rest; we could not speak or eat. Toward afternoon appeared, limping down a long, red clay road, a single, smoke-stained, fiery-faced bandaged soldier. With one accord the women fell upon him like a swarm of bees, questioned, fed, soothed, exalted him. He was rather a dreadful-looking person, we had to own, and his manner unpleasant, to say the least. His wound, on examination, proved a mere scratch on the middle finger, but he rose to the occasion as a hero, and answered our fevered, eager queries with statements that took our breath away.

“The Seventeenth Virginia,” he responded to our especial inquiry. “Why, they fought like tigers and was cut all to pieces. Hardly an officer was left.”

A beaming smile and a strong whiff of whiskey accompanying this revelation, we took heart to doubt. But none the less, that first wounded soldier from Bull Run had enjoyed a monopoly of patriotic sympathy never again to be surpassed.

A little later we heard of Confederate victory and that our boys were safe. It nerved us for the evening’s work. After dark, a train came thundering into our station,

Page 49 stopping to ask food and drink for the wounded. By lantern light we passed through the cars, carrying and distributing all there was to give.

Over and again we were to do this service during the four years to come. Never, perhaps, with such keen emotion.

The day before, a closely veiled, shabbily dressed little woman, her luggage a small archaic hair-trunk inscribed with undistinguished name, had been put off a train from Richmond upon the platform before our poor, overpacked hostelry. In vain did Lipscomb, our distracted host, assure her there wasn’t a room or a bed left for any one - nothing save a servant’s pallet on the floor of a hot garret. Also, he stated, looking her over doubtfully, all the occupants of this ‘hotel’ were members of officers’ families well known to General Beauregard. She kept her ground manfully, explained that she had been ill of typhoid, had come all the way from New Orleans to be near her brother at the front, and had no strength to turn back; so he gave her the garret, where a negro girl carried her food and drink; and we lookers-on thought no more of her in the greater excitement of the coming battle.

In the evening, my mother having gone on to Culpeper Court House to volunteer as a nurse in the new military hospital, my aunt, who was busy elsewhere, suggested that I go up to see what had become of the odd little woman in the garret. When I tapped at the door it was no uneducated voice that bade me enter, but one sweet and refined, coming from a girl huddled on a chair near the window, who sprang up to meet me with a cry of joy.

“News! News from the front?” That was all she wanted, not supper or anything. The servant girl had

Page 50 told her the troops were moving. It was a mercy to speak to any one; she had cried all day, and now thought she would go mad.

Little by little, it came out that she was the petted daughter of a wealthy Creole family, engaged to a lieutenant of artillery, with whom she had quarrelled and broken just as he went off to Virginia with the battalion in which her brother was also an officer. Repenting, she tried to wire him her regrets, and finally, on the impulse of a moment, had left the plantation where her family were, went into her mother’s town house, possessed herself of the housekeeper’s trunk and garments, and set off for Virginia. Her intention, only to see him and then go back again, spite of her dread of the brother’s wrath should he find out her escapade, was now frustrated by the movement to the front!

Taken thus into confidence in a rare romance of which the heroine seemed to my fervid imagination one of the most fascinating little creatures ever seen - charmed by her good looks, her dainty lingerie with fine embroidery and lace, the rich toilet articles strewn about, and the gold-mounted writing-case from which she took her lover’s portrait to show it to me I readily promised secrecy and, if possible, help. She cheered up at this, and to my surprise ended by kissing me, then promised to eat her neglected supper and try to sleep.

During the battle, next day, she again passed out of my mind, and when, at dusk, a shabby little veiled figure stole up upon the platform and begged me to go with her for an instant to her room, I acquiesced. When there, she burst into a storm of tears and sobs. The day had nearly killed her, she had spoken to nobody, her heart was breaking with anxiety. She had heard there was a list of wounded in the grocery store; would I

Page 51 mind seeing whether his name or her brother’s was upon it?

And then she told the names which I was to come to know well and respect in after days!

I coaxed her downstairs again, and while all the rest of us squeezed into the little country store where, behind the counter, by the light of a tallow candle, a man was spelling out a newly arrived register of the casualties of the day, she stood outside in the darkness, afraid to show herself. Begging for a glance at the paper, I ran my eye hastily over it, and the third or fourth name was that of her lover, “badly wounded!” And - strange happening of my first war love-story! - just after I had induced her to go back to her room with her misery, the first train of wounded men from Manassas slowed up at Bristoe, and while every woman and girl in the hotel except herself went through it carrying milk, water, brandy, and bread, to my lot it fell to minister to a young Louisiana artilleryman lying upon a cot in a freight car, suffering greatly, but with perfect fortitude; while she who had been his affianced was at ten steps from him, wearing her heart out in longing for him, yet knowing nothing of his vicinity.

The sequel of this episode was, alas! not cheerful. They met again in Richmond, whither he was taken and she followed, but the breach between them widened instead of drawing together, and then two lives went apart.

On Saturday evening, July 20, a messenger was sent by General Beauregard to the ladies and children at Bristoe, saying that an engine and car would be placed at their disposal, with urgent advice for them to leave immediately for a point of greater safety, since a battle was impending upon whose issue it was impossible to

Page 52 count. The women, sewing flannel shirts and making bandages fast as hands could fly, looked at each other and sent thanks to the general, with the answer that they preferred to stay.

That Sunday of the “first Manassas” was a repetition on a larger scale of our experience of the 18th. Some women sewed awhile, then ran bareheaded, desperate, out in the burning sun to look, to listen, to pray, to yearn! With every fresh roar of cannon came the piercing javelin of thought, “Was mine taken then?” “Was mine?”

By mid-day we heard of victory and the rout of the Federal forces. By evening we had individual returns. Again, those most near to us were preserved in safety.

My brother, the marker, although twice ordered by his sympathetic superiors to the rear to guard hospital stores, had managed to get his full share of the excitement. The story told by his captain of seeing the tired little fellow, during an interval in the fight, asleep under a tree, near which a shell had burst without warning or awakening him, went into the newspapers with sundry other more sensational accounts of his prowess, since disavowed. He told us of wading Bull Run quite up to his knees, in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and of the long tramp to Fairfax Court House and back; the greatest hardship to our troops being that they were obliged to pass by forsaken tents with delicious soup boiling itself away upon the fires, and abundant food everywhere - together with a sutler’s wagon broken open, its tempting contents scattered on the ground - when all they could lay hold of as first spoils of war was a jar of “sticks of candy,” greatly enjoyed in the ranks as far as it would go.

Page 53

My brother was that same evening ordered by General Longstreet, who picked him up upon the field, to his headquarters as “courier.” His duties of message-carrying to the various headquarters through the camps were made lighter by the necessity of exercising the fine horses of a late staff officer, Colonel Fisher, killed in the action of the 21st, and his leisure time more pleasant by the society of Colonel Moxley Sorrel and an afterward much-talked-of Major Terry, a noted scout and Texan ranger, who delighted him by stories of Indian warfare on the plains, etc.; the line of demarcation between officers and privates having hardly yet made itself felt, so numerous were the gentlemen in ranks. Shortly afterward, through our friend, Congressman W. W. Boyce, of South Carolina, Clarence received his commission as midshipman in the Confederate States navy, and reported for duty in Richmond. From that time till the end of the war he was in active service whenever opportunity occurred.

A fact about the first battle of Manassas told to me by my husband, years later, as an authentic instance of the secret history of the war, may be inserted here. A lady in Washington it was, a member of the family of Mrs. Dolly Madison, who actually enabled the Confederate generals to win that important victory in July, 1861, and the Confederate government, after that success, to muster men and resources in the South unavailable had we suffered defeat. The fact was well known and always admitted by Confederate authorities.

An impatient expectation was at fever heat in both North and South. General Scott and his lieutenants were incessantly urged by his government to move upon the enemy. The whole Northern press was clamoring

Page 54 “on to Richmond.” “We shall move to-morrow,” was repeatedly announced from Washington, to be followed, on the morrow, by the explanation, “The advance is necessarily delayed for a week, for further preparation.” By the middle of July, everything seemed to depend for the South upon concentration of our forces at the exact moment of advance, before General McDowell could be reinforced by General Patterson. Until then, her brigades must be kept widely distributed - General Johnston before Martinsburg, General Bonham at Fairfax Court House, General Holmes on the Potomac, near Eastport; a force that, if assembled, would be greatly outnumbered by General McDowell’s single column.

To accomplish this end, General Beauregard must know exactly when McDowell should be ordered to begin his march of invasion.

From the lady in Washington this fateful information came to Confederate headquarters, carried by a trusty messenger down the Potomac on the Maryland side, who, crossing near Dumfries, reached Manassas at the critical instant, safely arrived with a note, reading as follows:

“McDowell has certainly been ordered to advance on the sixteenth. (Signed) R. O. G.”

The informant’s initials and handwriting were recognized, her statement accepted. Bonham, pulled behind the line of Bull Run, narrowly escaped his pursuers, who, at noon on the 17th, marched through what had been his camp. Holmes was brought up on the right; Johnston was called down from before Patterson, to arrive in the very nick of time during the battle of

Page 55 the 21st when the unexpected appearance of his men threw McDowell’s right into confusion, resulting in the panic and rout of his army.

So much for a clever woman’s use of official information gained unexpectedly. Not the first time, however, that a woman’s touch has set the pendulum of a nation’s fate aswing!

My dearest mother was by now well launched in her hospital nursing at Culpeper Court House, first, among the many soldiers ill in the Methodist church, and, later, among the wounded. Her life from this time forward (afterward at Camp Winder, near Richmond) was of the hardest and most heroic kind. I have never known any woman possessed of better qualifications for her task. With a splendid physique, almost unbroken good health, a tireless hand, and a spirit of tender sympathy, she was the ideal attendant upon homesick boys from the far South, disheartened by illness at the outset of their campaign, as well as those cruelly mangled and wounded in the first fights. Almost every comfort we have nowadays in nursing was absent from the beginning, and toward the last the hospitals were unspeakably lacking in needfuls. Sleeping on a soldier’s bunk, rising at dawn, laboring till midnight, my mother faced death and suffering with the stout spirit that was a rock of refuge to all around her. Her record, in short, was that of a thousand other saintly women during that terrible strife. How many dying eyes looked wistfully into hers; how many anguished hands clung to hers during operations or upon death-beds! What poor lonely spirits far from home and kin took courage from her lips, to flutter feebly out into the vast unknown! What words of Christian cheer she whispered! what faith, hope, love were embodied in that tall, noble figure

Page 56 and sweet, sad face moving tirelessly upon her rounds!

“They call to me all over the church like a set of boys after their mother,” she wrote me at this time, “and tell me they should give up and die if I left them,” and then, characteristically modest, she begs me not to show this letter to any one. And here, a lifetime intervening, I venture to disobey her!

A week after the first battle of Manassas I rode on horseback with a party over the field, between hill-sides piled with hecatombs of dead horses and scattered with hasty graves. The trees and undergrowth were broken and bullet-riddled. The grass between the scars of upturned earth was green as if it had known no baptism of fire and blood, and little wild flowers had already begun to bloom again, but for obvious reasons we could take but a passing glimpse. I saw a ghastly semblance of a hand protruding at one spot, and thought of it when I stood in the crypt of the Pantheon, in Paris, by the gloomy tomb of Rousseau, where a skeleton hand holds up from within the bronze coffin lid of the French philosopher and epoch-maker.

My mother had arranged for me to stay near her at Culpeper, at a beautiful old place called Belprי, where I was most kindly entreated and made one of themselves by the family. It was my wise mother’s desire that I, already pressing forward into unwonted privilege and eager to consider myself “a young lady,” should be put back into the place habitual to immature years, and spend my days in reading and study. Alas! it was wartime; I had already tasted the sweets of emancipation; the woods were full of handsome and delightful officers and privates, eager to be entertained and heartened for the fray. Like all the other girls of my acquaintance

Page 57 thereabout, I grew up in a night, and soon there was plenty of women’s work for us!

Even now, writing of it after so many, many years, I seem to feel again the pulse of that thrilling time. And it was here that there came intimately into my life one of its strongest influences, in the radiant person of my cousin, Hetty Cary, daughter of my uncle, Wilson Miles Cary, of Baltimore, my father’s elder and only brother. She, with her younger sister, Jennie, had taken the lead in the secessionist movement among the young girls in Baltimore, who, having seen all their best men march across the border to enlist with the Confederates for the war, relieved their strained feelings by overt resentment of the Union officers and troops placed in possession of their city.

It was Jennie Cary who set Randall’s stirring poem of “Maryland” to the air of “Lauriger Horatius” (brought to her by Burton Harrison, when a student at Yale College), and first sang it with a chorus of her friends in a drawing-room in Baltimore. She tells me that the refrain, as originally printed in the copy of verses cut by them out of a newspaper, was simply “Maryland!” and that she added the word “My” in obedience to the exigency of the music. As the song thus boldly chanted by young Confederate sympathizers, in a city occupied by their enemy and under strict martial rule, was to drift over the border, to be caught eagerly by the troops of the Maryland line, and to echo down the ages as the most famous battle-song of the Confederacy, it is fitting that to Miss Jennie Cary should be awarded all the honor of this achievement. We both sang it amid a little group of visitors in September, 1861, standing in the doorway of Captain Sterrett’s tent at Manassas, the men of the Maryland line facing us in

Page 58 the dusk of evening. This was in answer to the request sent in from the soldiers to their friend, Captain Sterrett, “that they might hear a woman’s voice again.” I can hear now the swing of that grand chorus, as the men gradually caught up the refrain and echoed it, and by next day, to our joy and pride, the whole camp at Manassas was resounding with “My Maryland!”

Miss Hetty Cary, as fearless as she was beautiful, having incurred the displeasure of the military government of Baltimore by shaking from the window of her father’s home, while the Union troops marched by it, a Confederate banner smuggled through the lines, had been warned to leave Baltimore under penalty of immediate arrest and transfer to a Northern bastile. The two sisters, carrying drugs for the hospitals and uniforms for friends, had run the blockade with their brother, crossing to join the army through many perilous adventures, and were now stopping with friends in Orange, to be ultimately under my mother’s chaperonage. I had always looked up to my cousin, Hetty, as a young girl is apt to do to an acknowledged belle and beauty older than herself, with a sort of adoring championship, and as circumstances were to throw us into the closest intimacy, I hardly believed in my good fortune, that summer, of going around with her in the exciting diversions of the hour.

Lest I be thought over-partial, I will quote an extract from a newspaper letter describing my cousin to the readers of the New Orleans Crescent (which gives also a fair idea of the liberality of praiseful epithet bestowed by Southerners upon their elected belles):

“Look well at her, for you have never seen, and will probably never see again, so beautiful a woman! Observe her magnificent form, her rounded arms, her neck

Page 59 and shoulders perfect as if from the sculptor’s chisel, her auburn hair, the poise of her well-shaped head. Saw you ever such color on woman’s cheek? And she is not less intelligent than beautiful…. She is dressed in pure white. It is worth a king’s ransom, a lifetime of trouble, to look at one such woman. No wonder Beauregard pronounced her the most beautiful in that city of lovely women - Baltimore.”

Such, with variants, was the kind of rhetoric bestowed on this young lady in her path through life. Perhaps the best thing I can say of her is that it never spoiled her, that she was always simple, straightforward, generous, and high-minded - daring to a fault, but not stooping from her inheritance of good breeding and gentle womanhood. In her train, her sister and I enjoyed some merry experiences of military entertainment that would not otherwise have come our way. In addition to the already-spoken-of visit to Manassas, in September of that year - when our party slept, or rather giggled, half the night, upon layers of cartridge flannel on the hard floor of a tent, with a row of hoop-skirts hanging like balloons on the pole overhead, and soldiers guarding us outside - we enjoyed a dinner with General Beauregard upon what he called his “last duck.” On this occasion was organized the troop of the “Cary Invincibles.” On a scrap of torn blue paper I find pencilled the list of its officers, including myself as “captain-general”; Miss Hetty Cary, lieutenant-colonel; Miss Jennie Cary, first lieutenant, etc., etc., with many dignitaries of the day placed in inferior positions! Colonel A. S. Barbour and Colonel H. W. Vandegrift were our military engineers; staff officers, Colonel W. W. Boyce and Lieutenant P. B. Hooe; Lieutenant-Colonel William Munford was historian and bard; the Hon.

Page 60 Mr. Clingman, private secretary; Mr. John Addison, chief cook; Governor Manning, scribe-general; and the vivandiטre was Mr. A. D. Banks.

To the readers of that ineffable romance, “The Heroine,” will immediately occur the personnel of the Lady Cherubina de Willoughby’s followers! So much fun grew out of our organization, and so much wit was lavished upon it by others, I venture to insert our nonsense here.

The Cary Invincibles being once bidden to a certain headquarters dinner, given on a hot summer’s day at a little roadside cabin near Bull Run, were treated afterward to the stirring spectacle of a division on the march, defiling along a red clay road gashed in Virginia soil, thus to be pictured by me as it appeared to my eager eyes:

“What was yonder cloud of luminous vapor rolling in - that wave of sound, gathering strength and substance as it reached the ear? Presently, emerging from the golden mist, we saw, first, horsemen, pacing leisurely; then caissons and guns; and after them, rank upon rank of marching men in gray! And above the dust, banners of scarlet crossed with blue!” And as they passed our group, some officer, recognizing us, started a chant, caught up along the line and rendered into a grand sonorous swing:

“She breathes, she burns, she’ll come, she’ll come

Maryland! My Maryland!”

There were our merry hosts, joining in the refrain with tremendous lung power; and there were we three girls laughing and crying, at once, in our delight. Who ever before had the luck, or planned with such consummate skill, so to entertain guests?

Page 61

In the autumn, when my cousins had gone to Albemarle to visit relatives, we three had the honor of being asked by the committee of Congress to make the first battle-flags of the Confederacy after the design finally decided on by them. It is generally stated by historians that these flags were constructed from our own dresses, but it is certain we possessed no wearing apparel in the flamboyant hues of poppy red and vivid dark blue required. We had a great search for materials. I had to content myself with a poor quality of red silk for the field of mine, necessitating an interlining, which I regretted. I have always been sorry we did not keep the model sketches, with directions, assigned to us by the committee which decided the matter, and delivered by Major A. D. Banks. Our work done, a golden fringe sewed around each flag (and, in my case, my name embroidered upon it in golden letters), we were at liberty to present them as headquarters banners to our favorite generals. Miss Hetty Cary, having first choice, sent hers to General Joseph E. Johnston, Miss Jennie Cary’s went to General Beauregard - serving to drape the coffin of Beauregard and of Jefferson Davis - and mine to General Earl Van Dorn, a dashing cavalry leader, for whom was then predicted great fame and success. I had never seen Van Dorn, and was rather alarmed at my temerity in selecting him, but I knew his aide-de-camp, Captain Durant da Pontי, grandson of the librettist of “Don Giovanni,” and himself a charming poet. Through Captain da Pontי, I was emboldened to send off my flag, with the following note. In those days, as I have shown, we were in favor of the flowery style of expressing high sentiment. I transcribe the correspondence from a newspaper clipping of the period:

Page 62 “CULPEPER COURT HOUSE, VA., “NOV. 10,1861.

“Will General Van Dorn honour me by accepting a flag which I have taken great pleasure in making, and now send with an earnest prayer that the work of my hand may hold its place near him as he goes out to a glorious struggle - and, God willing, may one day wave over the re-captured batteries of my home near the down-trodden Alexandria ? “I am, very respectfully, Genl. Van Dorn’s obedient servant, “CONSTANCE CARY.”

“ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, MANASSAS, “Nov. 12, 1861. “To MISS CONSTANCE CARY, CULPEPER C. H.

“Dear Lady: The beautiful flag made by your hands and presented to me with the prayer that it should be borne by my side in the impending struggle for the existence of our country, is an appeal to me as a soldier as alluring as the promises of glory; but when you express the hope, in addition, that it may one day wave over the re-captured city of your nativity, your appeal becomes a supplication so beautiful and holy that I were craven-spirited indeed, not to respond to it with all the ability that God has given me. Be assured, dear young lady, that it shall wave over your home if Heaven smiles upon our cause, and I live, and that there shall be written upon it by the side of your name which it now bears, ‘Victory, Honor and Independence.’

“In the meantime, I shall hope that you may be as happy as you, who have the soul thus to cheer the soldier on to noble deeds and to victory - should be, and that the flowers wont to bloom by your window, may bloom

Page 63 as sweetly for you next May, as they ever did, to welcome you home again. “Very truly and respectfully, dear lady, I am your humble and obedient servant. “EARL VAN DORN, “Major-General, P. A. C. S.”

Captain da Pontי told me that when the flag arrived at Van Dorn’s headquarters and was adopted into the division, a young officer sprang up, unsheathed his sword, and held it hilt downward upon the table, while one after the other of his comrades clasped the blade; when all swore a knightly oath to make good the giver’s petition, after which they drank to the flag and to her.

Ah! well! One may grow old and the snows of “yesteryear” may have fallen thick over young hearts and hopes, but one does not forget such scenes or the spirit that inspired them!

One day at Culpeper, when I sat sewing with my mother, I was summoned to see a man who said he “was a messenger from General Van Dorn.” I found awaiting me, cap in hand, a huge cavalryman with a bashful boy’s face, who bowed and blushed as I came in, explaining that he had a note from the general, to be put into my hand only. The note placed at my disposition Charles Dillon, special scout and most trustworthy courier, who “might be soon going into Alexandria, and would bring out, if he had an order to my friends, anything I had left behind, and wanted.”

“Oh! But there’s nothing I have, or ever had, worth risk to a brave soldier,” I made haste to protest. “I’ve the general’s orders, miss,” he said, “and if it wornt anything better, I was to get you a little bit of a flower. You’re the lady that made our

Page 64 headquarters battle-flag, miss, and we think a good bit of that flag.”

The end of it was that, ten days later, Dillon brought me a little wrap of blue and white, one of my girlish treasures, deeply lamented, which he had secured through a note to my great-aunts, now removed to Alexandria. He had gone into the town disguised as a countryman driving a cart-load of firewood; and what further the big fellow brought away with him, I never asked.

Dillon became one of the most famous scouts of the early war time, achieving a hundred brilliant exploits. He came to his death, poor fellow, at the hands of a party of United States cavalrymen, who are said to have cut the head from his body, leaving him in the woods. For this horror I cannot vouch. After mentioning him in an article for the Century Magazine, I received this letter: “ALLEGHANY, NEW YORK, March 31, 1886. “MADAM:

“In your article, “A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the War,” published in the August (1885) number of the Century, you speak of a famous scout by the name of Dillon, and when I read it I was filled with a desire to know if he was not Charles Dillon, a noted Confederate scout and spy, who lost his life near Burke’s Station, Virginia, in March, 1862. This fellow surely was one of the most daring, and his body was decently buried by my company.

“Very likely his comrades never knew his end, his grave was marked with his name, but the evacuation of Manassas was begun about that time, and the Confederates never had possession of that territory afterwards.

Page 65 The incident of his capture created no little interest at the time and you may have known of it. If you did not, then I think if he was the same Dillon who brought you the relics, you will be interested to know what I have written; and these thoughts I beg to offer as an apology for the liberty I take in addressing you. “Very respectfully yours, “H. C. ALTENBURG.”

Strangely enough, I never met General Van Dorn, whose sphere of military action was soon transferred to the South-west. My flag went with him through much brilliant service to the Confederacy in Virginia, in the trans-Mississippi, and the States of Tennessee and Mississippi. It was torn with bullets and stained with the smoke of Pea Ridge, Corinth, Iuka, Holly Springs, and other battle-fields, when, after his death, it was finally put back into my hands, through the general’s instructions, by his nephew, Captain Clement Sullivan. I have it now at my house in Washington.

One of the meetings I prized most was that with Major Pelham, of Alabama, a young hero, whose name, “the gallant Pelham,” given to him by General Lee, was already on every tongue around us. He was on horseback before a friend’s door in Culpeper, waiting till I came out to mount for a ride somewhere. A slim boy with a dark, sparkling face is what the splendid Pelham seemed to me in that brief encounter, followed by a little war of wits. He was killed in 1863 - having just received his promotion as lieutenant-colonel - in an engagement at Beverley Ford, to which he had hastened on a borrowed horse while on furlough, making a visit. Springing to arms at the first sound of a cannon in his neighborhood, this brilliant

Page 66 young officer, who had passed through so many general engagements with safety, fell in a terrible fire from the enemy, and was carried back into Culpeper to the house of the friends where I first met him, and where his death occurred.

Page 67 CHAPTER IV

IN the early days of the winter of ‘62, my mother, wedded to her beloved hospital work at Culpeper Court House, sent me to Richmond to be under care of my uncle and aunt, Dr. and Mrs. Fairfax, who had found quarters in the Clifton House, a dreary old building, indifferently kept, honey-combed with subterranean passages suggesting the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, where, however, we girls certainly managed to extract “sunbeams from cucumbers.” For there my Cary cousins, Hetty and Jennie, arrived from Charlottesville to join our refugee band, and the reign of the beautiful Hetty began as, perhaps, chief of the war beauties of the day. Our cousin, Jennie Fairfax, was also of our merry group. For want of a sitting-room, we took possession of what had been a doctor’s office, a little way down the hilly street, communicating with the hotel by an underground passage, dark as Erebus, through which, in rainy or snowy weather, we passed by the light of a bedroom candle. Many a dignitary of State and camp will recall our Clifton evenings. Several times we gave suppers to which we contributed only a roast turkey, a ham, and some loaves of bread, with plates and knives and forks. It was an amusing sight to see a major-general come in hugging a bottle of brandied peaches, and a member of Congress carrying his quota of sardines and French prunes. At these feasts there was a democratic commingling of officers and “high-privates.”

Page 68 To the latter, it was part of our creed always to dispense our best smiles and tidbits. So great was the rush of visitors that our mulatto attendant, Cornelius, dubbed “the Centurion,” was kept from striking for liberty only by much cajolery and frequent small tips.

Of the town gayeties that winter I recall a fancy-dress party at the McMurdo’s, in Grace Street. One of the daughters, Miss Saidee McMurdo, an exquisite creature with large dark eyes and arched brows, married Mr. Alfred Rives, of Albemarle, and became the mother of Amיlie Rives, the author, now Princess Troubetskoi (Mrs. Rives has died since these words were written). This was my first “real” party in Richmond, and my mother being in town on a rest furlough, she made up for me, with her own dear fingers, the costume of a Louis XV court lady, styled “Mme. la Marquise de Crךve-Coeur,” decided upon chiefly because of a stiff old petticoat of wine-colored reps silk found in some family trunk. Shopping diligently, she had found spangles for my shoes and fan; feathers for the high-rolled powdered hair were lent from some one’s store; mask, pearl necklace, and old blonde lace were forthcoming, and my kind uncle cut out from court-plaster a coach and horses, by way of a patch of the period, for the cheek. What the other girls wore I selfishly can’t remember!

The first event to bring all patriotic Richmond into the streets that winter was the inauguration of our President, Jefferson Davis, on February 22, 1862. We were asked to witness the ceremony from a window of the Virginia State Library in the Capitol by our friend, Mr. John R. Thompson, the librarian-in-chief, and were entertained, while awaiting events, with the latest Northern papers, Harper’s Weekly and others, together

Page 69 with the extraordinary apparition of a box of French bonbons just arrived by underground express.

It was a dismal day, depressing to stoutest spirits, rain falling heavily, and Capitol Square beneath us one mass of open umbrellas. When the poor wet bishop and the President-elect came upon the stand, there was an immediate, portentous hush in the crowd. One heard nothing but the patter of the winter rain. The brief ceremony over, when President Davis kissed the book, accepting, under God, the great trust of our young and struggling nation, a great shout went up and we distinctly heard cries of “God bless our President!” That evening President and Mrs. Davis received at their residence, making a most favorable impression upon all Richmond.

We had been hearing a good deal of the inner life of the President’s family from a young inmate of his household destined to play an important part in my life thereafter. This was Burton Norvell Harrison, born in Louisiana, of Virginia parentage on the father’s side, who, at the instance of his friend, Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar, had been summoned by the President to be his private secretary at the moment when Mr. Harrison was about to enlist in New Orleans as a private in the ranks of the Washington Artillery. Mr. Harrison, having graduated at Yale in the class of 1859, had been designated by President F. A. P. Barnard, then of Oxford University, in Mississippi (whose first wife was Mr. Harrison’s aunt), to occupy a junior professorship in that institution, and had remained there until the outbreak of the war.

During vacations from Yale spent with his uncle, the Rev. Dr. William Francis Brand, rector of St. Mary’s Church, near Emmorton, Maryland, Mr. Harrison had made friends with my Baltimore cousins, who were

Page 70 intimate with the Brand family; but I had never chanced to meet the much-praised young Yalensian, whom the Cary girls had vaunted until I declared myself aweary of his name. It was at the Clifton House, where Mr. Harrison came to call upon my cousins, that our acquaintance began.

We were all interested in what Burton Harrison had to say of the Davises. Every one knew the traditions of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, as handed down from her career as a senator’s wife in Washington, in the administrations of Pierce and Buchanan. She was declared to be a woman of warm heart and impetuous tongue, witty and caustic, with a sensitive nature underlying all; a devoted wife and mother, and most gracious mistress of a salon. Miss Margaret Howell, the exceedingly clever sister of Mrs. Davis, afterward Mme. de Stoeurs, of England, was the young lady of the Richmond White House; and it is safe to say that no wittier talk was ever bandied over the teacups in any land than passed daily between the several bright spirits thus assembled at the President’s table. Mrs. Davis had been somewhat depressed, on the day of the inauguration, by an arrangement for her progress to Capitol Square made by her negro coachman. When they set out, at a snail’s pace, she observed, walking solemnly and with faces of unbroken gloom, on either side of her carriage, four negroes in black clothes, wearing gloves of white cotton. Demanding impatiently of the coachman what in the world this performance meant, she was informed: “This, madam, is the way we always does in Richmond at funerals and sich-like.” Mrs. Davis, telling the story inimitably that evening, said she was almost grieved to have to “order the pall-bearers away,” so proud were they of their dignified position.

Page 71

Concerning the affairs, big or little, of “The Chief,” Mr. Harrison was wont to preserve continual discreet silence. He would say only that the President had the happiest relations with his family, by whom he was revered, incidentally remarking that to accompany the chief on horseback, always his duty, together with some of the aides, was to sit in the saddle indefinitely, in good or bad weather alike, never knowing when they were to bring up at home again, and keeping Mrs. Davis in continual uncertainty as to her dinner-hour, to say nothing of her husband’s fate. A familiar and picturesque figure was President Davis in the streets of Richmond from that day forth. From “Richmond Scenes in ‘62,” published in “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” I reproduce my sketch of him, which, since it was edited by my husband, I feel may be regarded as of some worth:

“He might be seen daily walking through the Capitol Square from his residence to the executive office in the morning, not to return until late in the afternoon; or riding just before nightfall to visit one or another of the encampments near the city. He was tall, erect, slender, and of a dignified and soldierly bearing, with clear-cut and highbred features, and of a demeanor of stately courtesy to all. He was clad always in Confederate gray cloth, and wore a soft felt hat with wide brim. Afoot, his step was brisk and firm; in the saddle he rode admirably and with a martial aspect. His early life had been spent in the Military Academy at West Point and upon the then north-western frontier in the Black Hawk War, and he afterward greatly distinguished himself at Monterey and Buena Vista in Mexico; at the time when we knew him everything in his appearance and manner was suggestive of military training. He was reported

Page 72 to feel quite out of place in the office of President, with executive and administrative duties, in the midst of such a war; General Lee always spoke of him as the best of military advisers; his own inclination was to be with the army, and at the first tidings of the sound of a gun, anywhere within reach of Richmond, he was in the saddle and off for the spot - to the dismay of his staff-officers, who never knew at what hour of the night or of the next day they should get back to bed or to a meal.”

The stories Burton Harrison told us of his adventures on such excursions were many, and sometimes amusing. For instance, when General Lee crossed the Chickahominy, President Davis, with several staff-officers and his secretary, overtook the column, and, with the secretary of war and a few other non-combatants, forded the river just as the battle of Mechanicsville began. General Lee, surrounded by members of his own staff and other officers, was found a few hundred yards north of the bridge, in the middle of the broad road, mounted and busily engaged in directing the attack then about to be made by a brigade sweeping in line over the fields, to the east of the road and toward Ellerson’s Mill, where in a few minutes a hot engagement commenced. Shot, from the enemy’s guns out of sight, went whizzing overhead in quick succession, striking every moment nearer the group of horsemen in the road as the gunners improved their range. General Lee observed the President’s approach, and was evidently annoyed at what he considered a foolhardy expedition of needless exposure of the head of the government, whose duties were elsewhere. He turned his back for a moment, until Colonel Chilton had been despatched at a gallop with the last

Page 73 direction to the commander of the attacking brigade; then, facing the cavalcade and looking like the god of war indignant, he exchanged with the President a salute, with the most frigid reserve of anything like welcome or cordiality. Then without allowance of opportunity for a word from the President, the general, looking not at him but at the assemblage at large, asked in a tone of irritation:

“Who are all this army of people, and what are they doing here?”

No one moved or spoke, but all eyes were upon the President; everybody perfectly understood that this was an order for him to retire to a place of safety, while the roar of the guns, the rattling fire of musketry, and the bustle of a battle in progress, with troops continually arriving across the bridge to go into action, went on. The President twisted in his saddle, quite taken aback at such a greeting - the general regarding him now with glances of growing severity. After a painful pause the President said, deprecatingly: “It is not my army, General.” “It certainly is not my army, Mr. President,” was the prompt reply, “and this is no place for it” - in an accent of command. Such a rebuff was a stunner to Mr. Davis, who, however, soon regained his serenity and answered:

“Well, General, if I withdraw, perhaps they will follow,” and, raising his hat in another cold salute, he turned his horse’s head to ride slowly toward the bridge - seeing, as he turned, a man killed immediately before him by a shot from a gun which at that moment got the range of the road. The President’s own staff-officers followed him, as did various others; but he presently drew rein in a stream where the high bank and the bushes concealed him from General Lee’s repelling

Page 74 observation, and there remained while the battle raged. The Secretary of War had also made a show of withdrawing, but improved the opportunity afforded by rather a deep ditch on the roadside to conceal himself and his horse for a time from General Lee, who at that moment was more to be dreaded than the enemy’s guns.

In the Union raid on Columbia, S. C., in the spring of 1865, Mr. Davis’s best-known mount, a white Arabian, was captured with all the horses and mules belonging to General James Chestnut, to whose care the President had entrusted it. I find in my album a letter from General Chestnut to the President, lamenting this occurrence, and saying he ranked all his own losses as nothing beside that of the famous steed.

About March 1, 1862, martial law was proclaimed in Richmond, and from that time till the day of the evacuation we lived amid continually thrilling scenes. Now came the joyful tidings that my brother’s ship, the cruiser Nashville, had successfully slipped through the blockading fleet off Beaufort, N. C., and that all on board were well. Her commander, the stately and gallant Captain Robert Pegram, welcomed with acclamation on his return to Richmond, came to call on us at the Clifton, and gave to our eager ears a synopsis of their stirring experiences since leaving Charleston in October. A few days later our midshipman walked in, looking taller, broader, and supremely happy to greet us all again.

The Nashville, intended for the convoy of the Confederate States commissioners, Mason and Slidell, but proving too big, had run the blockade from Charleston to Bermuda, coaled at Bermuda, and made a long voyage of twenty-three days to Southampton, England. In the British Channel, off the Needles, they had burnt and

Page 75 sunk the American merchant-man, Harvey Birch, bringing her men, thirty in number, into Southampton, where they were set at liberty. This exploit and the discussion ensuing in the newspapers caused the Nashville to rise immediately into prominence in England. While they lay in port numberless visits were made to the ship. My brother, standing one day on the quay, saw approaching him “a tall, distinguished-looking man, with a florid face and long smooth chin, whom I knew at once was ‘somebody.’” This proved to be no less a personage than Lord Palmerston, Premier of England, who, on his way to visit the queen at Osborn House, had turned aside, unofficially, to make a call upon the commander of the famous Nashville. At his request, my brother took his card in to Captain Pegram, who immediately came out and conducted his lordship to his cabin, where he remained some time, an incident fortunately not getting into print.

Some of the officers of the Nashville repaired at once, on leave, to London, others to Paris. My brother, in company with his close friend and fellow-midshipman, Irving Bullock, of Georgia (uncle of ex-President Roosevelt), ran up to London to see the sights, and two happier lads could not have been found. Drawing their pay in gold, petted and welcomed by sympathetic Britons, and having achieved the יclat of a notice in Punch, they described themselves as “living like fighting chickens generally.”

Irving Bullock was declared by his comrades to be “a tall, stalwart fellow, the best in the world, and a splendid officer.” Long after the war, when Mr. Bullock, married to an English lady, was living in Liverpool, he would make it a point whenever my brother crossed to England to come out on the tender and welcome

Page 76 his old shipmate, literally with open arms, lifting Clarence off his feet in an exuberant embrace. His death was a sorrow to all who knew him. Mr. Cary has frequently talked of him to Colonel Roosevelt, who remembers his uncle with sincere affection and respect.

London and all England was then under the pillar of cloud of the Prince Consort’s death. An incident of the Nashville’s stay at Southampton was the arrival of the Trent, having aboard the Confederate ladies of the commissioners’ families. My brother had the opportunity of hearing, at first hand, the version given by charming Miss Slidell of her adventure with our mother’s first cousin, Lieutenant Donald Fairfax, U. S. N., the young officer sent aboard the Trent to remove the Confederate envoys, whom history has alleged to have been smitten in the face by this spirited and justly wroth young lady! When, in later years, Admiral Fairfax came to visit me at my summer home in Bar Harbor, we did not revert to those long-ago events.

Another happening in port, was the embarcation, for service in Canada, of two crack regiments of the Royal Life Guards, whose officers exchanged entertainment and courtesies with those of the Confederate cruiser. When the two troop-ships finally sailed away, decks crowded, bands playing, colors flying, our midshipman decided that to be the most gallant spectacle seen in all his life.

Very soon this holiday experience was to be exchanged for grim duty. The Queen having declared England to be neutral ground for the two opposing forces, the United States warship Tuscarora, tired of lying in wait outside for the coveted prize in harbor, came in to coal. While they were obliged to wait in port for twenty-four

Page 77 hours stipulated by international law, the Nashville, hoisting what colors she could muster, sailed out to sea, and lost them their precious opportunity. The voyage, extremely bad from start to finish at Bermuda, was yet without encounter with the enemy. More than once, with broken machinery, both paddle-boxes stove in, starboard bulwark carried away, decks and houses continually under water, they almost gave up hope of reaching land. At Bermuda they coaled and repaired the ship. Starting for Fort Macon, at Beaufort, North Carolina, they captured and burnt a schooner, and at six o’clock on a Friday morning, in broad daylight, ran the blockade at that point by means of a ruse, flying the private signal flag of the New York merchant firm, “Spofford & Tileston,” under the United States flag.

One of the blockading squadron, believing them to be the United States mail-boat, and thereby neglecting precautions, lowered a boat for mail. The Nashville, by that time inshore of her enemy, hauled down her false colors, ran up the stars and bars, and dashed for Fort Macon at a speed that made the old ship tremble at every jump. Immediately, but in vain, the blockader sent thirty shots after the fleeing cruiser, received with rapturous applause by several thousand Confederate soldiers on the ramparts of the fort!

In April my mother left Culpeper Court House to rejoin me, and we removed from the coal, smoke, and gloom of the Clifton House to lodgings in Miss Clarke’s pleasant home in Franklin Street, surrounded by a pretty garden and embowering trees. In Richmond the spring opens with a sudden glory of green leaves, magnolia blooms, and flowering shrubs. My cousins, Hetty and

Page 78 Jennie, were with us under my mother’s charge. We had rides into the surrounding country and walks in the woods bordering the river and canal. There was a brief interval of peace following the long winter of disaster and uncertainty.

I had, at the request of Captain B. F. Eshleman, of the Washington Artillery of New Orleans, a body of admirable soldiers who had wakened to enthusiasm the daughters of Virginia, made for and sent to them another battle-flag. One morning an orderly arrived at Miss Clarke’s, to say the battalion, on its march through Richmond, would pass the house at a given hour, and desired my presence at the front gate, that they might salute the donor of their flag. Punctual to the moment, we stood, a group of ladies, bareheaded under the canopy of green leaves above the sidewalk, I a little in advance, while the travel-stained battalion filed by us. My heart beat high with pride as the officers saluted with their swords, the band played “My Maryland,” the tired soldiers sitting on the caissons that dragged wearily through the muddy streets set up a rousing cheer; and there, in the midst of them, taking the April wind with daring, was my banner, dipping low until it passed me!

These were no holiday soldiers. Their gold was tarnished - their colors faded by sun and wind and gallant service - they were veterans on their way to the front, where the call of duty never failed to find the flower of Louisiana.

In Captain William Miller Owen’s spirited book, “In Camp and Battle With the Washington Artillery,” occurs a passage describing the battalion as it went into battle at Malvern Hill, a short time after: “This is a supreme moment in the history of the Washington Artillery -

Page 79 the first time it ever moved in full armament, with its four batteries, to the battle-field. What a glorious sight! See the sixteen guns! What beauties - rifles and Napoleons taken from the enemy at Manassas and Seven Pines. Sixteen caissons - thirty-two carriages in all - nearly three hundred men and two hundred horses. What a sight to gladden a soldier’s eye! In front of all rides the colonel on his black stallion, ‘Rebel,’ a pace behind rides the adjutant; then the chief bugler and the guidon-bearer carrying the little scarlet banner with the blue cross, the gift of Constance Cary. Just behind came the batteries, the captains riding in front of each.”

Mr. Sumpter Turner, of the Washington Artillery, writes, in 1908: “This flag, now in the arsenal at New Orleans, was the one we carried through the war.”

I went to a war-wedding at the Monumental Church on the site of that old-time tragedy, the burning of the Richmond Theatre, when Miss Adeline Deane, a beautiful blonde, daughter of Dr. Deane, was married to Dr. Lyons. There was a reception afterward at Dr. Deane’s house in Grace Street, crowded with rusty uniforms. A daughter of this couple is Mrs. Swanson, wife of the recent Governor of Virginia.

On coming out of church one Sunday we heard the crushing news of the fall of New Orleans and of the capture of our ironclads. The information coming from the lips of Mrs. Randolph, wife of our kinsman, General George Randolph, Secretary of War, was undisputable. Mr. Jules de Saint Martin, of New Orleans, brother-in-law of Mr. Benjamin, who was walking with us, made no remark.

“This must hit you hard,” said some one to him.

Page 80

“I am ruined, voilא tout!” was the answer, with a characteristic gesture of throwing care to the winds.

This debonair little gentleman was one of the great favorites in war society in Richmond. His cheery spirit, wit, and exquisite courtesy made friends for him everywhere; and although his nicety of dress, after the Parisian style, was the subject of comment when he first appeared upon our streets, he joined the volunteers before Richmond and roughed it pluckily in the trenches as a private. Years after, M. de Saint Martin, calling on my mother and me in Paris, told a story of camp life in the freezing trenches, when on one occasion Colonel T. L Bayne called him away from his place of bivouac on the ground to come with him, bidding him tell nobody, as he had found a spot where they could “sleep warm.” Eagerly Saint Martin followed his guide to be introduced, in the wintry dark, to an enclosure full of snuffling, grunting creatures, among whom they lay down in oozing mud; it was a pigsty, nothing less, and there they slept till morning!” It is true that their noses disturbed me now and then,” said the narrator, “but que voalez vous! I was freezing!”

Now nothing was talked of but the capture of New Orleans. The stout spirit of the South had received its most telling blow! My brother, the midshipman, had just before this been ordered to what was considered one of the finest commands in the Confederate States navy - the new ironclad Mississippi, then building in New Orleans, and expected to sweep the Northern coast. On the day before the United States fleet passed in to the taking of the forts, Clarence had been sent in charge of a boat-load of deserters and ordnance to a Confederate States ship in the river. That day, “just for fun,” as

Page 81 he expressed it, he and another middy accompanied Lieutenant Reed, going on duty at Fort Jackson, under a hot fire of shelling. While crossing the moat around the fort in a canoe, a 13-inch mortar shell fell near them, half filling their craft with water. No wonder the commandant of the fort, in greeting them, asked the two midshipmen, in vigorous terms, “What are you young fools doing here, anyway?” They dodged about for a while in the bomb-proof casements, listening to the swift rush downward through the air of shells “that sounded as motorcars do now” (says the projector of this foolhardy expedition), and then pulled back against the fierce strength of the Mississippi current under the same fire, passing a wounded alligator, hit by a piece of shell.

Aboard the steamship Star of the West (the vessel that drew the opening shots of the war at Charleston and which was seized off Indianola, Texas, in 1861, and was later sunk by the Confederates in the Yazoo, near Fort Pemberton), next day, saw my brother and other midshipmen in charge of six millions in gold and silver coin from the mints and banks of New Orleans, with three millions in paper money, over which their orders were to keep guard with drawn swords, hurrying away from doomed New Orleans, where along the levees burning ships and steamers and bales of cotton stretched in a fiery crescent. Had they delayed a day, they would all have been swept away in the enemy’s resistless onslaught. Keeping just ahead of the enemy’s fleet, they reached Vicksburg, thence went overland to Mobile, where their charge was delivered up in safety, my brother returning to Richmond, where he was assigned by Secretary Mallory to the somewhat light duty of aid to the Secretary - “principally

Page 82 reading newspapers at the Navy Department and once escorting Mrs. Mallory to Drury’s Bluff,” as recorded by himself.

We had come to the end of May, when the eyes of the whole continent turned toward Richmond. On the 31st Johnston assaulted the Federals, who had advanced to Seven Pines! It was so near that the first guns sent our hearts into our mouths, like a sudden loud knocking at one’s door at night. The women left in Richmond had, with few exceptions, husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers in the fight. I have never seen a finer exhibition of calm courage than they showed in this baptism of fire. No one wept or moaned aloud. All went about their task of preparing for the wounded, making bandages, scraping lint, improvising beds. Night brought a lull in the frightful cannonading. We threw ourselves dressed upon our beds to get a little rest before the morrow.

During the night began the ghastly procession of wounded brought in from the field. Every vehicle the city could produce supplemented the military ambulances. Many slightly wounded men, so black with gunpowder as to be unrecognizable, came limping in on foot. All next day, women with white faces flitted bareheaded through the street and hospitals, looking for their own. Churches and lecture-rooms were thrown open for volunteer ladies sewing and filling the rough beds called for by the surgeons. There was not enough of anything to meet the sudden appalling call of many strong men stricken unto death. Hearing that my cousin, Reginald Hyde, was reported wounded, two of us girls volunteered to help his mother to search for him through the lower hospitals. We tramped down Main Street through the hot sun over burning pavements,

Page 83 from one scene of horror to another, bringing up finally at the St. Charles Hotel, a large old building. What a sight met our eyes! Men in every stage of mutilation, lying waiting for the surgeons upon bare boards, with haversacks or army blankets, or nothing, beneath their heads. Some gave up the weary ghost as we passed them by. All were suffering keenly and needing ordinary attention. To be there empty-handed nearly broke our hearts. Bending down over bandaged faces stiff with blood and thick with flies, nothing did we see or hear of the object of our search, who, I am glad to say, arrived later at his mother’s home, to be nursed by her to a speedy recovery.

The impression of that day was ineffaceable. It left me permanently convinced that nothing is worth war!

My mother was now in her element - expert, silent, incomparable as a nurse, she was soon on regular duty in an improvised hospital. I spent that night at the window of my room panting for fresh air, and longing to do something, anything, to help. The next day my friend, Emily Voss, and I had the pride and pleasure of having assigned to our care, under an older woman, two rooms containing fifteen wounded men lying on pallets around the floor. From that moment we were happier, although physically tried to the utmost. Gradually, some order came out of the chaos of overtasked hospital service. The churches gave their seat cushions to make beds; the famous old wine-cellars of private houses sent their priceless Madeira, port, sherry, and brandy; everybody’s cook was set to turning out dainties, and for our own men we begged unblushingly until they were fairly well supplied. At night, carrying palm-leaf fans, we sauntered out into the streets scarcely less hot than in full sunshine. Once, literally panting for a fresh

Page 84 breath of air, a party of us went with an official of the Capitol up through the vapor bath of many steep stairs, to emerge on a little platform on the summit of the building. There - oh! joy - were actually breezes that brought relief. There we sat and looked down on the city that could not sleep, and talked, or listened to the voice of the river, that I seem to hear yet over the tramp of rusty battalions, the short, imperious stroke of the alarm bell, the clash of passing bands, the gallop of horsemen, the roar of battle, the moan of hospitals, the stifled note of sorrow - all the Richmond war sounds, sacred and unforgettable.

Day after day one heard the wailing dirge of military bands preceding a soldier’s funeral. One could not number those sad pageants in our leafy streets: the coffin with its cap and sword and gloves, the riderless horse with empty boots in the stirrups of an army saddle! Such soldiers as could be spared from the front marching with arms reversed and crape-shrouded banners, passers-by standing with bare bent heads.

Funerals by night were common. A solemn scene was to be enacted in the July moonlight at Hollywood when they laid to rest my own uncle, Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax, of whom in the old service of the United States, as in that of the Confederate navy, it was said “he was a spotless knight.” My uncle, who had commanded a battery on the James, was prostrated by malarial fever and taken to Richmond, where he died at the Clifton House, tenderly nursed by his sisters. He was to my brother and me a second father. His property, fortunately so invested in Northern securities as to be unavailable during the war, was left between his three sisters, thereby enabling us, after peace was declared, to resume a life of comfort, when many of our Confederate

Page 85 friends were in absolute want. My other uncle, Doctor Fairfax, of Alexandria, had, in the abundance of his belief in the Confederacy, put all of his fortune into Confederate bonds, and suffered a total loss of it.

A personal incident of the fight of Seven Pines was a visit during that morning from a young officer, sent into town from the battle-field with important despatches to the President. Whilst awaiting the reply, he came, with his orderly in attendance, to say a word to me, and as I stood with him at our garden gate the cannonading suddenly increased tremendously.

“That’s my place, not this. If I don’t come out of it, remember I tried to do my duty,” he said with a hasty handshake, and springing into his saddle, the horse rearing fiercely, he waved his cap and spurred away, the orderly clattering after him. It was the last time I ever saw him. In one of the battles of July he fell, leading his men in a splendid charge, and in him many bright hopes and a noble future were extinguished.

Page 86 CHAPTER V

BEFORE the seven days’ battles in front of Richmond were delivered, my mother insisted upon my going with my aunt to Botetourt Springs, in the south-western hill country of Virginia, in a region that seemed to our strained and weary gaze, to our ears jaded with sounds of battle and hospital, akin to paradise. Leaving the train, we drove in an archaic stagecoach through a fertile valley between bluest mountains, under summer skies with little silver clouds afloat “on the broad field of heaven’s bright wilderness.” At the wayside hamlets where we stopped to water horses, stolid country folk asked vague questions about the “fighting down Richmond way,” more interested in the non-arrival of a jug of molasses or a sack of meal than in the issue of the battles. When we arrived at our destination, a young heart in spite of itself rebounded from dreadful pressure. I felt like a bird that has flown through storm-clouds to rest in some leaf-protected nest. What joy to lie down at night without fear of being awakened by shot or shell or rattle of musketry, or by summons to the window to hear of a casualty to a friend or relative - to get up to idle days of rambling in the woods, of freedom from surroundings of mangled and fevered humanity one was powerless to save!

Such, at least, should have been my attitude of mind. As a fact, after a few days’ absence from Richmond I longed madly, wildly, to be back again. News penetrated to us but grudgingly. We wrested it piecemeal

Page 87 from the slow speech of passing stage-drivers, and from weekly newspapers. We lived from mail to mail.

No privilege on earth seemed so great as sharing sorrow with those we loved. From a wounded cousin, who arrived on furlough, we heard of the fall in battle of General Turner Ashby, “the stainless, fearless hero,” as President Davis called him; of whom General Stonewall Jackson wrote in his report of the cavalry combat: “As a partisan officer, I never knew his superior. His daring was proverbial; his power of endurance inexhaustible; his tone of character heroic; and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the purposes and movements of the enemy.”

From childhood I had heard tales of the dashing and hard-riding Turner Ashby, of Fauquier, and had felt proud when he said nice things to me once at the Fauquier White Sulphur Springs. All the men in our family knew and lamented him. He was like one of the old-time warriors, born not made.

Of that summer of sorrow I recall one bright episode - a ride on horseback of seventy miles, to and from the Natural Bridge of Virginia, with a stop on the way at the handsome old mansion of the Andersons, where our party was hospitably entertained. We felt that in that blest abode of peaceful plenty war could not penetrate; yet, in the next year, the house was burnt and the whole beautiful region surrounding it laid waste by the firebrand, General Hunter, in his retreat before Early and Breckinridge.

Our road lay between a succession of noble views of hill and dale, the weather was perfect, and the before-mentioned spirits of youth overflowed happily. We rode races, jumped hurdles, improvised tourneys, spearing at a ring of plaited willow hung upon a bough. I

Page 88 wonder if a girl of to-day would believe that in addition to a haversack with necessaries of the toilet strapped to my saddle, I carried, hidden under the folds of a long, ample riding skirt, a mysterious parcel like a cage collapsed and twisted into a figure 8 - the hoop-skirt, without which no self-respecting female of that day ventured to appear, save on horseback!

We were upon the Natural Bridge without knowing it, of course, and I needs must alarm our party out of its wits by emulating a certain venturesome cousin, and old sweetheart of my father’s, Mary Chapman, handed down in local story as having stood waving her handkerchief on the cut-off stump of a tree projecting above the precipice. This lady was grandmother of the lovely Ella, Marquise de Podestad, renowned for her charm and beauty in Washington and Madrid, who in her later days became lady in waiting to ex-Queen Isabella of Spain, and died at Biarritz after a life of many sorrows.

On our return from this expedition we heard of the renewal of fighting before Richmond. My aunt heard, too, of the alarming illness of her brother Reginald, in Richmond. She was eager to go to him, and as to our convalescent colonel, wild horses could not have bound him to remain! I, only, was left under care of the principal of the Hollins Institute and his kind family. How I begged to go back with the others!

Next came the awful battle week - seven days of furious fighting close to the gates of Richmond. During the battle of Mechanicsville, the President and many of the cabinet, with hundreds of spectators, watched its progress from the encircling hills. The roofs of the high buildings in the town were also crowded with lookers-on, and the enemy’s balloons were plainly visible hovering over the field. After dark that night, the firing

Page 89 still went on, and numbers of people saw the magnificent sight of bombs bursting in air and the flash of thousands of muskets, accompanied by the incessant roar of artillery. To go home from such a spectacle was to seek a bed, but not to sleep, and dawn next day brought a renewal of the terrible experience, while the streets were again and again filled with ambulance trains, the result of the day before.

And now a great pזan of gratitude went up to General Lee, acclaimed as the savior of Richmond from destruction, the supreme leader to whom all eyes turned for protection from our foe. My family letters were full of pride that our old neighbor at Arlington had thus risen to the forepeak of glory in the Confederacy. Every one, too, was talking of the wonders of Stonewall Jackson’s generalship; the two great Virginians seemed to be riding on a wave of popular glory.

We chafed at absence from the centre of all interest. Had not Commodore Sydney Smith Lee, our midshipman’s chief in the Navy Department, sent my brother to me to recruit after an attack of malarial fever, I could hardly have borne the strain, as news of my uncle Reginald’s death came at the same time. Then my mother gave herself a brief rest. Worn out with grief and nursing, with new lines in her sweet face, and eyes full of unshed tears, she came to her children. Nothing seemed hopeless after that!

When it was certain that our boys were marching across the border into Maryland, and that, save for my brother on sick leave, every male creature belonging to our numerous “Connection” was in the advance, what wonder that we strained at the leash of patience till it burst. No longer able to endure peace in Botetourt, back we all went to hot, dusty, uncomfortable Richmond.

Page 90 There we found all thoughts fixed on Maryland, all hearts dilating proudly with oft-repeated tales of victory to our arms. Letters drifted to us telling of the hardships of the march; of subsistence on a diet of parched corn, or corn plucked and eaten raw as did the disciples theirs, of old; of bare feet; of burning thirst quenched by lapping from roadside pools and cowtracks; of ragged clothes and dirt intolerable, borne until some blessed stream or river gave them a chance to dip.

Many of these privates in the ranks were mothers’ darlings, hitherto lapped in the luxury of lavish Southern homes - numbers of them just ready to enter the university. One of his comrades told us of the youngest son of the commanding general, a private in the Rockbridge Artillery, at the battle of Sharpsburg, where his battery had suffered from having three guns disabled and losing many men and horses. Having but one gun left, they were ordered out of the fight. Coming unexpectedly upon General Lee and his aide, the general looked at first with unrecognizing eyes upon the smoke-stained goblin who revealed himself his son. Upon hearing that their remnant was ordered again to the front for duty, young Lee protested: “Why, General, you are not going to send us in again?”

“Yes, my son,” he answered smiling, “you must all do what you can to help to drive those people back.” Another incident, told in a soldier’s letter, was when Private Robert E. Lee, shabby and travel-worn, appeared at the commanding general’s headquarters barefooted, carrying in his hand the ragged remnant of a pair of shoes. “I only wanted to ask, sir, if I might draw a new pair, as I can’t march in these.”

“Have the men of your company received permission to draw shoes yet?” asked the general.

Page 91

“No, sir; I believe not yet.”

“Then go back to your battery, my boy, and wait until they have.”

After recording these anecdotes, I received a visit at Belvoir House, Virginia, from Captain Robert E. Lee (strongly resembling his illustrious father) with his wife and little girl, Ann Carter Lee. He says the Rockbridge Artillery stories are in the main true. He doesn’t remember about the shoes, but it might well have been. What he does recall, and has told in his own most interesting book about General Lee, was once when, after one of the battles before Richmond, black with dirt and smoke, he had crawled under his caisson on the open battle-field, trying to get a sleep, some fellow poked him awake with a sponge-stick and said: “Come out o’ that, will you! Here’s somebody wants to see you!”

On emerging, he was confronted by General Lee, in speckless full uniform, mounted upon his charger and surrounded by his staff with some distinguished foreign visitors. Again the general did not recognize the begrimed being who modestly presented himself, but when he did so a loving smile broke over his face and he spoke to him cheerily, saying he had ridden by to see if he were safe and was glad he was well through it!

Captain Lee tells me it required some nerve to meet the curious glances bestowed upon him by all those clean and well-equipped people!

If of such stuff the leader, what of the troops? Such stories, passed from lip to lip on bivouac, or written home to anxious parents, did a world of good in heartening those who had to bear the same hardships.

The tale of the Maryland campaign had about it a dash and daring peculiarly attractive to young minds.

Page 92 Our blood coursed hot in answer to the news of Stonewall Jackson’s repulse of Banks at Cedar Mountain; of Jeb Stuart’s wonderful raid, circling the entire Federal army; of Jackson’s capture of Union stores at Manassas; of the bloody battles of Groveton, second Bull Run, and Chantilly.

During their two hundred miles of march in one short month, fighting and skirmishing continually, our friends went barefooted, or with their feet in raw cowhides, living on half rations, but their letters bore no complaint. Had not their beloved General Lee said to them: “History records few examples of greater fortitude and endurance than this army has exhibited.” After that, what did little things matter?

About one of my own nearest of kin, young Randolph Fairfax, private in the Rockbridge Artillery in this campaign, his friend and messmate, now the Rev. Lancelot Blackford, head-master of the Episcopal High School in Fairfax County, wrote:

“I have seen him when detailed as teamster from the 15th of July to the last of August, after a fatiguing day’s march and just as we were about to go to rest, called up to go in the dark for forage to feed his teams. He bore all exacting duties such as watering, feeding, currying and harnessing horses with such equanimity and sweetness as to strike his associates. The point on which officers and men chiefly agreed in admiring Fairfax was his unswerving devotion to duty whether in camp or in action. Members of the company would remark with emphasis, ‘What a good soldier Fairfax is!’” The quality of men in action under whip and spur of a certain animal excitement does not always bear the fine test of such experience as this; I cite it as illustrating a phase of war life on the Southern side necessarily overshadowed in

Page 93 history by the conspicuous achievements of the leaders. In John Codman Ropes’s splendid “Story of the Civil War” I find the following:

“The population (of the Southern States), almost wholly occupied in agricultural pursuits, was necessarily accustomed to life in the open air, to horses, to hunting and fishing, to exposure, to unusual physical exertion from time to time. Such conditions of life naturally foster a martial spirit. Then the aristocratic rיgime which prevailed in the slave-holding States was conducive to that preference of military over civil pursuits which has generally been characteristic of aristocracies. The young men of the better classes eagerly embraced the profession of arms as offering by far the noblest opportunities for the exercise of the higher virtues, and for allowing the greatest distinction in the State… . Endowed with a marvellous capacity of endurance, whether of physical exertion or lack of food, uncomplaining, ever ready for a fight, the soldiers of the South were first-rate material in the hands of the able officers who so generally commanded them…. It cannot be doubted that the Southern volunteers frequently scored successes over their Northern adversaries for the simple and sole reason that to them, the game of war, was not only a perfectly legitimate pursuit, but one of the noblest, if not the noblest that could claim the devotion of brave and free men. They went into it con amore; they gave to its duties their most zealous attention; and they reaped a full measure of the success which those who throw themselves with all their hearts into any career deserve and generally attain.”

We were in Richmond when that desperate fight was fought at Antietam, of which a war historian has written, “It is likely that more men were killed and wounded

Page 94 on the 17th of September than on any single day in the whole war.” Twelve thousand men killed on each side! Twenty-four thousand of the hope of the great continent, the joy of their homes, North and South, left dead upon a single battle-field!

By this time, in some degree keyed up to endurance of the repeated shocks of war, we went quietly about our tasks of daily life. Except for the numbers of people swathed in black met in its thoroughfares, Richmond showed little trace of its battle summer. As yet the pinch of the times did not greatly affect the home commissariat, although we refugees had to be satisfied with simple living in other people’s rooms, since a whole house to ourselves could not be thought of. When asked into private houses we found tables laid, as of old, with shining silver and porcelain and snowy damask, although the bill of fare was unpretending. The custom of giving the best of everything to the hospitals went on till the end of the war. Society was reinforced by a number of agreeable and highbred women from all parts of the South, many of whom had previously graced a wider social sphere in Europe and America. Its peculiar attraction lay in the total absence of pretence. People thus bound by a common tie of interest and poignant sympathy tolerated no assumption of superior fashion in any of their number. In such an atmosphere flourishes best the old-fashioned grace of neighborliness. To the very last, each refugee family shared what it had with the other; while Richmond folk threw open their broad, delightful homes to receive their friends, with or without gastronomic entertainment; lent furniture to those in need, and sent dainty little dishes to the sick. All rejoiced in each other’s joys, grieved with each other’s griefs. Hardships in such company were lightened

Page 95 of their weight. Sorrows so shared were easier to bear.

From our midshipman, now aboard the receiving-ship Indian Chief, in Charleston harbor, came a stirring account of a night of mutiny aboard, due to the crew breaking into the spirit-room and possessing themselves of its contents, then going mad with drink. For a time the officers kept the drunken brutes in order with their cutlasses; several were wounded, some fell down a hatchway, breaking legs and arms, and then the rest were secured. Next morning the ship presented a singular appearance, prisoners in bonds on all sides, decks encumbered with seamen bucked and gagged, and the rigging freely adorned with men triced by their thumbs!

Next, our lad was transferred to the “Ladies’ gunboat,” the gift of the women of Charleston to the Confederate States Government, an ironclad carrying four guns, called Palmetto State - an experience of bitter cold, in November weather with no fires aboard. Later in the winter Palmetto State went outside Charleston bar, in company with the C. S. S. Chickamauga, and attacked the blockading fleet. In their “metallic coffin,” they ran up toward the U. S. S. Mercedita, in the dim light of early morning, and rammed her with their bow. “A crash, a smash, a broadside” - so runs the letter I copy here - “and the Mercedita surrendered, sinking. We had a running fight all day, but slipped away unharmed, and came back by Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, receiving their salutes.” That night Charleston could not make enough of her defenders!

In December, 1862, Fredericksburg was fought. In that notable victory to Confederate arms our family met with an irreparable loss. My uncle’s son, Randolph Fairfax, aged eighteen, a private in the ranks, fell

Page 96 beside his gun and was buried by his comrades after dark upon the spot. This youth, handsome and gifted, serious and purposeful beyond his years, the flower of his school and college, in all things worthy the traditions of his warlike ancestry, was killed by a piece of shell entering the brain, as he stood by his gun at sunset under a hot fire from the enemy’s batteries. A day or two later his body, still wrapped in his soldier’s blanket, was disinterred and brought through freezing weather to Richmond, where he was placed, uncoffined, on a bier before the altar in St. James’s Church. An ever fresh memory is that of the sweet and noble face so unchanged, after two days’ burial. Save for the cruel mark on the temple made by the piece of shell, and the golden curls matted with the clay of his rude sepulchre, he might have been asleep. He wore still the coarse flannel shirt, stained with battle smoke, in which he fell, and across him was thrown the blanket that had been his winding-sheet. When it was proposed to my uncle that the body be dressed again, he answered:

“No. Let my son sleep his long sleep as he fell at the post of duty.” And thus, his coffin draped with the flag he had died for, Randolph Fairfax was borne to his rest in Hollywood. From camp at Fredericksburg, on December 28th, General Lee wrote to my uncle the words that follow:

“I have grieved most deeply at the death of your noble son. I have watched his conduct from the commencement of the war and have pointed with pride to the patriotism, self-denial and manliness of character he has exhibited. I had hoped that an opportunity would have occurred for the promotion he deserved; not that it would have elevated him, but have shown that his

Page 97 devotion to duty was appreciated by his country. Such an opportunity would undoubtedly have occurred; but he has been translated to a better world, for which his purity and piety have eminently fitted him. You do not require to be told how great his gain. It is the living for whom I sorrow. I beg you will offer to Mrs. Fairfax and your daughters, my heartfelt sympathy, for I know the depth of their grief. That God may give you and them strength to bear this great affliction, is the earnest prayer of your early friend. “R. E. LEE.”

Our stricken family, like many another, felt how nobly the great leader helped to bind up the wounds of war by words like those!

General Lee certainly united extraordinary qualities. I think it was Sir Walter Scott who somewhere said: “My voice shall be for that general who will possess those qualities which are necessary to command men like us. High born he must be or we shall lose our rank in obeying him - wise and skillful, or we shall endanger the safety of our people - bravest of the brave, or he shall peril our own honour; temperate, firm and manly, to keep us united. Such is the man to command us!” He might have added, “gentle as a woman in conveying sympathy.”

In the latter part of February, 1863, it became necessary for either my mother or my aunt to carry to Washington certain papers connected with the inheritance coming to them from the estate of their late brother, in order to secure much-needed provision for the clouded and uncertain future of their families. After some debate it was decided that Mrs. Hyde should be the one

Page 98 to go; and I, with the love of adventure coursing through my veins, induced them to let me accompany my aunt. I should never allow a girl of my own to do it, assuredly - but “autre temps, autre moeurs” - and then, I knew not fear.

Bidding farewell to those friends in Richmond who looked upon us as predestined to a Northern prison, we went first to stop with our friends, the owners of Belprי, near Culpeper, not far from the winter-quarters of General Fitzhugh Lee’s division of cavalry. Here we remained while casting about us for ways and means to cross the border and get into Alexandria. Not only were the chances of war in favor of our capture on the way - that did not appall us, since we were intent strictly on private business - but from every side came gloomy tales of swollen rivers, deserted villages, a war-ravaged country liable to forays from prowling vagabonds of either army, and the likelihood of running upon a skirmish at any moment. Worst of all, it seemed impossible to hire a conveyance.

Waiting, however, in a pleasant country house near the headquarters of a crack cavalry division, with a dozen gallant knights ready to do one’s lightest bidding, had its endurable side. There were visits to and from camp; rides, shooting-matches - “General Fitz” presenting me with a tiny Smith and Wesson revolver captured by himself, which he taught me to wear and use - and, at evening, gatherings around the big wood fire at Belprי, when we laughed and talked and sang … !

At this distance of time, it is not telling tales out of school to say that the leader of fun in those evenings was the major-general commanding, future governor of the commonwealth of Virginia, and years later a trusted chief of the United States forces in the Spanish-American

Page 99 war. One was as sure of jollity and good-fellowship in “General Fitz” off duty as of soldierly dash tempered by the wisdom of a born leader when in action.

It is pleasant to note that to the last of his varied soldierly experience this General Lee retained the wide measure of popularity with the masses that had always been his portion. It was observed that during the progress of the procession at President Cleveland’s inauguration ceremonies, General Fitzhugh Lee, riding a magnificent horse, provided for his use by a loyal old friend, a citizen of Alexandria, was more continuously applauded when passing down the lines than any other person present saving the hero of the day; and this was apt to be the case in all his public appearances.

One day, when returning from a visit to a friend, I rode from Culpeper Court House to Belprי with the general, a darky sent ahead on mule-back, detailed to carry my other hat and dressing-bag, a very demon of mischief entered into my escort. In a wood road, where no one could see him, he rode standing in the saddle, picking dried wayside flowers at a gallop, backward, forward, in every attitude that man can assume upon a steed, while forcing my horse to keep pace with his “stunts,” as he called them, acquired in his old army life upon the plains. Presently, espying our Mercury, despatched some time before, slowly jogging down the narrow road ahead of us, he put spurs to his horse, uttered an Indian war-whoop, and bore down upon him at a run. The negro, terrified by the onslaught, not stopping to inquire into its nature, lashed his mule and set off like the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, I, overpowered with laughter, left far behind.

Looking around us for an opportunity of entering the Union lines at Fairfax, we heard of a lady living at

Page 100 some distance from Culpeper who had the same end in view as ours. To visit this lady and propose joining forces and sharing expenses in the expedition, it was necessary to ride twelve miles across country as the crow flies, for which purpose General Fitz Lee offered me his mare, Refugitta - a beautiful high-spirited little creature I had ridden several times before - and the escort of his aid and cousin, Major Robert Mason. We set off in high feather on a sunshiny morning of February, but were overtaken by a tremendous storm of wind and rain, changing to snow, when remote from any possibility of shelter, in a desolate part of the country, all fences gone, a deserted negro cabin here and there the only sign of past habitation. Very soon my habit was wet through, my gloves were clinging to fingers so cold I could hardly hold the bridle. When Major Mason, himself looking like a young Father Christmas, finally insisted that I should get down for a while and walk, to restore circulation, I slipped like a log from my saddle, so stiff that my members refused to do their office. The short cape and military gauntlets of my comrade had already been forced upon me.

Thus equipped, we tramped back and forth, beneath a grove of pines, till the fury of the gale was spent. By and by the wind lessened, the snow fell sparsely, and we resumed our saddles. Soon, over on the slope of a near-by mountain, we descried a large farm-house with - oh! joy - a blue curl of smoke issuing from the chimney. Making all speed, we reached the goal, which, indeed, proved to be the dwelling we were in search of. Never have a big wood fire, hot drinks, food, and a rest between blankets, while my habit was dried, seemed such a boon to me! To my disappointment, I found that the mistress of the house had already set out “to

Page 101 run the blockade,” and that she would have been “only too glad” of our company. I will not aver that the twelve miles of ride home that day was not a trial to my endurance. My comrade, a hardened cavalryman, said afterward that he spent his time wondering if girls were not of tougher build than men. I should have died of shame to confess how often I longed to break down and say I couldn’t stand it a minute longer. Happily, after a good night’s rest, I was none the worse for my expedition.

At last General Fitz Lee told my aunt that from the report of scouts he could venture to send us in a headquarters ambulance, with a guard of picked men, as far as Warrenton. Our families being so closely allied in friendship for many a year, he felt and appreciated the importance of our mission, and most kindly desired to furnish the transfer to Riggs’s Bank, in Washington, of the papers my aunt carried upon her person.

To Mrs. Hyde was apportioned a split-bottomed chair in a comfortable ambulance drawn by the best mules at headquarters. To me was again allotted my favorite “Refugitta,” the general and several staff-officers forming a gay cortטge of escort for a certain distance on our way, and Major Mason put in charge of the expedition. It was a brilliant, cloudless day in late February, with a promise of spring in the air, when we set out. Long before reaching Hazel River, our first crossing of a risky ford, the general and his aides had taken leave, after wishing us a hearty bon voyage. On the banks of Hazel River, an angry, turbid little stream, boiling between red clay banks, we were obliged to possess our souls in patience for half a day, waiting until it was safe to attempt a crossing for the ambulance. Beyond the swelling flood we were to meet somewhere the escort of

Page 102 twenty-five cavalrymen, assigned to guard us into Warrenton and sent on the day before to see that the way was clear. In the society of a garrulous miller and his spouse, who told many weird tales of skirmishes around them during the past months, we remained till afternoon, when the miller announced that though it was “still a leetle resky for wimmin folks crossin’,” he “reckoned we mout try.”

Consigned to a chair in the ambulance, on which I was glad enough to climb and crouch before the end, we began the passage of the Red Sea. Major Mason and his orderly, kneeling in their saddles, rode by the heads of our mules, tugging and adjuring them. At one point both mules and horses became lost to sight, save for their heads, brave little Refugitta following the orderly. A sticky fluid lapped around our feet. Shouts rent the air. A sort of hurricane of strong language burst from our united protectors. Our mules were swimming.

Perched on our chairs, trying not to listen to the “music in the air,” we at last felt our wheels grate upon a pebbly bottom. A long, strong tug, accompanied by more language, and we were safe, if moist, upon a miry bank! “You’ve jist got to coax a muel,” said our driver blandly, turning in his seat.

“Is that the way you coax in the Army of Northern Virginia?” we asked, looking around rebukingly on the chief guardian of our party. But he was mysteriously absent, and did not show again till ready to help me upon Refugitta’s back. Bounding along in a swift, even gallop over a smooth wood road, we spoke in undertones, for we were now on debatable ground, where no one knew what an hour might bring forth in the way of a surprise.

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Approaching Jeffersontown, a poor deserted hamlet where we were to pass the night, the major halted the convoy while he rode forward to investigate. It was too dark to distinguish faces. From a forsaken smithy upon a little knoll, we saw issue two or three military figures, showing black against a streak of yellow lingering in the western sky. Simultaneously, a challenge, an answer, and a cheer! It was our bodyguard on bivouac, waiting, uncertain as to the cause of our delay. They surrounded and preceded us, as we went hopefully forward to the sleeping-quarters they had secured in a dwelling not far off. To the ladies a bedroom was given, the major had another, while the escort slept on their arms in the hallway below.

The family owning the house were ardent secessionists, who made us welcome to their best. Two nights before, they had less willingly provided refreshment for a party of Union cavalry. One could never tell, they said, when the blue-coats might ride up, or when the gray. Not a sound, however, broke the silence of that wintry night. When we came down, next morning, it was to find a snapping fire of logs, around which gathered, in cheerful sunshine, a circle of tall, bearded fellows, who rose up and stood smiling at our approach. A good country breakfast of “hog and hominy,” with hot coffee, had already been served to them. While the same fare, with corn-dodgers, was being prepared for us, we made individual acquaintance with our manly guards.

Off again, over ground every inch of which knew the ring of troopers’ steel and the clash of sudden conflict. Two scouts preceding, the rest formed into a double line, I riding midway with the major, the ambulance following. Snow began to fall, and the deep woods were transformed into a fairy-land of beauty, powdered

Page 104 branches meeting overhead, a white mantle resting lightly underfoot upon the carpet of last year’s leaves and moss. If there were a fallen branch ahead of me, a dozen hands were stretched out to remove it. A big, rough trooper rode up and begged me to put over my wet gloves the woolen mittens his wife had knit for him at home. There was no wind, and I did not mind the snow. Never would I have exchanged this royal progress for the tame comfort of the inside of the ambulance.

“One mo’ ribber for to cross!” sang out somebody ahead, and this time I begged to keep on my saddle, effecting successfully the passage of a chafing stream. Nearing Warrenton, we left the warm shelter of the woods for a turnpike road, where every movement must be one of caution. Our men, alert, speechless, eager, did not relax their vigilance till one of the scouts, riding back at a gallop, announced the way free into the village.

Clattering up to the door of the hotel, we found rooms and supper. To my sorrow, our escort was dispersed into the countryside to seek quarters less exposed. And now, a long farewell to all our greatness! Into thin air melted the pageant of the days before. Vanished our plumed cavaliers, our bounding steeds, our mules and equipage! Henceforward we must encounter for ourselves the perils of the road, stealing like marauders into our own county, where our people had been rooted like the oaks around their homes.

We hired a country cart of the old-time hooded variety, wherein, drawn by mules and enthroned on straw, we made creeping progress toward Centreville. On the road we passed a tired woman carrying her baby, a crying child tugging at her skirts, driven by starvation, she

Page 105 said, to go inside the Union lines. We naturally picked them up, and the hours that followed were hardly cheerful. Sleeping at a poor farm-house that night, we awoke to find a party of Federal soldiers ringed around it, who proceeded to search the premises. When we got downstairs the officer in charge was waiting at the breakfast-table. Although they were in pursuit of some one more important, it was necessary for him to know who we were and what our business there. “Property owners in Fairfax County, going to their home on matters of private business,” did not seem to suffice him as an explanation. We must come with him to report at United States headquarters in Centreville.

Lacking other means of advance, we then hired the only vehicle of the establishment, a pole on four wheels, drawn by two oxen; and balanced upon this, our trunks bound on somehow by the depressed Confederate sympathizer who drove us, a bayonetted guard walking on either side, we superbly entered the village of Centreville. At headquarters the officials in charge made a thoroughly conscientious effort to penetrate our disguise of innocence and stamp us guilty, but the case baffled them. A full examination of our luggage failed to develop anything save the fact that Confederate principles were antagonistic in a marked degree to the theory of personal adornment. In the perplexity of the situation, they decided to send us on as prisoners of war to Brigadier-General Hayes, stationed at Union Mills, on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, whence, they said, parties of “refugees from the rebel lines” were daily expedited to Alexandria.

The bitter cold drive of six miles to Union Mills in a little open trap, plunging up and down in deep ruts of frozen clay cut by army wagons in a heavy soil, or going

Page 106 at a snail’s pace between six stolid Germans, holding their bayonets as they marched on either side of us, was actually the most painful experience of our adventure. My aunt, with her stately figure and beautiful clear profile, in her mourning garb, sitting so calm and self-controlled amid her strange surroundings, reminded me of some grande dame of the French Revolution going in a tumbril to execution. For nothing in the world would she have condescended to make a complaint; we had deliberately placed ourselves in this situation, and must make the best of it!

Ahead of us were several wagons loaded up with country refugees, Germans and Irish, going to Washington to take oath of allegiance and seek for better fortunes. One of these vehicles, piled high with household goods, upset, and there were wails from the women and children belonging to it, though nobody was badly hurt. While waiting for them to clear the road, we suffered intensely with the cold, arriving finally at Union Mills so thoroughly congealed it was hard to set our feet upon terra firma.

Stumbling to the ground, we paid our driver and were shown into a room heated to suffocation by a red-hot stove, and crowded with the unhappy “refugees,” men, women, and children, who had arrived ahead of us, all nearly perishing of cold and fatigue. We gave but one glance into the interior and turned away sickened by the noxious atmosphere, to meet a smart young staff-officer who, with the most astonished face I ever saw, could not for the life of him understand what we two were doing there!

Ten minutes later, seated before a bright fire in the officers quarters above, we were kindly and courteously urged to partake of hot coffee, which we accepted, and

Page 107 champagne, which we refused. How long it had been since we had seen champagne!

A room, hastily made ready, contained two army cots, gayly striped blankets, tin basins set upon a bench, delicious toilet soap and towels, a mirror, and two tall tin cans of boiling water. A tray of supper sent in “with the general’s compliments,” filled our hearts with overflowing gratitude to our noble foes!

“I am glad I’ve Scripture warrant for it, for I simply love my enemies,” one of us exclaimed, in heartfelt tones.

A cattle-train, the box-cars crowded with the poor emigrants on benches, afforded the sole means for our getting on next day. Our kind host, the general, relieved his mind of us by letting us go to Alexandria on parole, under supervision of the provost-marshal there. By order from his headquarters we were allowed to travel in the cab of the engine, and thus whizzing past many a well-known landmark in our county, we regained the old town left two years before under such different circumstances.

We went at once to my uncle’s house in Cameron Street, where my great-aunts were installed, and spent a day or two with them, going about in the interval among old friends. Things looked very sad, the secession spirit in the town kept under by a rod of iron giving people a wistful, cowed expression, and the streets crowded with alien soldiers. Wherever we went, in shop or dwellings, our hands were grasped with speechless sympathy, tears impeding the utterance of greetings, then we were hurried into corners to ask about “our boys.” When I compared our shabby clothes with their apparently smart ones, they would exclaim: “But what are clothes to standing side by side with those one loves in a life-or-death struggle like ours?”

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Finally, leave was accorded us by authority to visit Washington and remain there until some decision could be arrived at in our case. We accordingly resorted to the house of a relative at the Federal capital, and with brief delay visited Riggs’s Bank, where my aunt had the infinite relief of depositing her valuable papers and realizing upon them funds much needed by our refugee family in the Confederacy.

For a few days we indulged in the pleasure of daily seeing my aunt, Mrs. Irwin, and her children, and other dear friends, as well as the unwonted practice of shopping in establishments that, after the barren wilderness of haberdashers’ shelves in Richmond, seemed resplendent. Then fell a thunderbolt! Certain Union sympathizers among our whilom friends having taken pains to communicate to the Secretary of War that he was harboring dangerous characters from the seat of rebellion, nearly allied with the leaders of Confederate Government, and full of menace to the Union cause, an order was sent to us, which I transcribe: “HEADQUARTERS, MILITARY DIV. OF WASH. “WASHINGTON, D. C., March 19, 1863. “CAPTAIN H. B. TODD, “Provost Marshal,

“Captain: By direction of the Secretary of War Mrs. E. C. Hyde and Miss Constance Cary, refugees from Richmond, will be sent South over the lines, with orders not to return inside the lines of the United States forces. “By Command of “BRIGADIER GEN. MARTINDALE “(Signed) JOHN P. SHERBURNE “Ass. Adjt. General “Official “A. W. BAKER, Lt. and Adjutant, Washington D .C.”

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A trim young lieutenant with good manners and, as afterward developed, a feeling heart - Lieutenant Clark Smith of the 169th New York regiment - stood in the hall below, as the instrument of fate. There was a wild rush of packing, surrounded by zealous friends. Whatever it was possible to squeeze into the Dixie trunks, with little presents for all our circle, went into them; much was worn, a good deal condensed into hand luggage. A smart braided riding-habit, a gown or two, and other coveted fripperies had to be left with their makers, ultimately reaching us by flag of truce. But one thing I could not entirely forsake - a new hat, an unimagined luxury since many months, that had been tried on and was waiting orders at the milliner’s! We had no sooner seated ourselves in the carriage opposite the polite lieutenant than a siege of the enemy ensued, shorter but no less successful than that of Richmond. In the end, our carriage, on its way to the boat wharf, drew up before the door of Miss Wilson’s fashionable millinery in Pennsylvania Avenue, and our lieutenant, issuing from it, returned carrying a bandbox! I hope this transgression has long ago been forgiven him! The new hat, so thought the Richmond girls, was well worth a dash upon the enemy.

I should perhaps have mentioned before the adventure of the hat that we had been driven first to the office of Provost-Marshal Todd, where the oath of allegiance to the United States Government was offered, and declined, with thanks. Mr. Montgomery Blair had sent me a note, addressed to those in high authority, stating that as I was the child of an early friend of his, he would be glad if circumstances would allow them to grant my requests (I suppose they were that we should not be molested, but allowed to stay and shop, since that was

Page 110 really all I wanted) but this did not avail! We were told that we must positively return to Virginia “as we had come,” and that without delay.

In Alexandria once more, we spent the night as prisoners of war, on an upper floor of my uncle’s house, the lieutenant occupying the little study to the left of the front door, a guard upon the pavement. From the town we were the recipients of universal sympathy, but in our hearts felt that since our work in Washington was done, and well done, our chief desire was now to get back to our friends. People flocked to the house, asking for us and sending messages. One of them, Miss Mary Daingerfield, afterward Mrs. Philip Hooe, eluding the guard at the front, went in the rear way where she had played as a child with my Fairfax cousins, climbed through a window, and arrived in our room, cobwebby and joyous, bearing a parcel of delightful little gifts.

Back at Union Mills again, and surrendered into the hands of our former host, we were greeted by jovial General Hayes with pleasant tidings. “I’m not going to let Fitz Lee boast he treated you better than we shall,” he exclaimed, when the question arose as to how he should dispose of the bad pennies returned upon his hands. So behold us seated in a smart ambulance, under escort of a dashing guard of forty men in blue, the general himself, with two of his staff, accompanying us to the limit of the Union lines. (I was, in time to come, to see my own boy wearing the blue uniform, as a member of Troop A of New York, a volunteer in the United States service in the war with Spain.) In parting I asked if General Hayes had any message to send to his old West Point comrade, General Ewell, who had lately lost a leg in Confederate service. (We had liked and admired

Page 111 General Ewell since the beginning of the war. After his wound we went sometimes to call at his lodgings, where we generally found installed, as guardian of his hearth and spirits, his widowed cousin Mrs. Brown, and her pretty, bright-eyed daughter Harriott, now living in Washington as the widow of Major Thomas Turner, of Kentucky, once of General Ewell’s staff. General Ewell’s marriage to Mrs. Brown was the outcome of his convalescence from this wound.) “Give my best love to good old Dick, and tell him I wish it had been his head,” was the laughing answer, transmitted in due time.

We made our way by divers methods and in slow stages across the debatable ground, always received for the night by sympathizers eager to greet and hear from us. After giving us of their best, they managed to hitch up some sort of a horse and vehicle to carry us on the next stage. A memorable stop was at the interesting old house of the Marstellars, whose master, even at that date, wore the queue and smallclothes of his ancestors. They sent us on in an antique coach of colonial pattern, yellow-bodied, blue-wheeled, high-swung, with a flight of carpeted steps letting down to admit the occupant, and a hoary old negro perched on the high box, to preside over the meanderings of “Blackberry and the colt,” the only steeds left in the Marstellar stable by raiders!

In bleak March weather, we crept wearily over deep-rutted clay roads, or “Black Jack” sloughs of Virginia mire, through melancholy wastes of landscape strewn with felled trees and burned houses. We recognized Camp Pickens, the seat of former gay visits to the troops, only by the junction of the Manassas and Orange railroads. At another old camping ground the earth was

Page 112 inlaid with hundreds of shoes cast away by Union troopers, newly shod. Handsome homesteads crowning the hills looked at us through empty eye-sockets, showing no sign of life; burnt barns and mills, trampled fields were everywhere - it was depressing in the extreme.

But we forged ahead, and for the final stage of our journey - to Rappahannock Station, where we expected to find an ambulance from General Fitz Lee’s headquarters, in answer to a note despatched by a wandering Black Horse man encountered on the road - hired a timorous countryman, in whose veins ran skim-milk, to drive us in a little covered cart. We started betimes in the morning, and as the day declined our protector’s fears waxed voluble.

“There ain’t hardly a day somebody don’t git held up hereabouts,” he would say gloomily. “One side or t’other, ‘tis ‘bout the same with these scouts when there’s hosses or mules to loot. Coase I ain’t afeared for myself, but when there’s ladies - thet toy pistol o’ yours ain’t but a mite, and anyways I’m no gret hand to shoot. A fellow don’t like to lose his critturs; does he, now? Last week they took a man’s mules and left him stropped up in the bottom of his wagon. This ain’t no place for female wimmen, nohow. Reckon the money I get from you won’t pay me for the worry. It’s a bad place we’re comin’ to, ahead. If ever I git home safe–—”

He was interrupted by the apparition, on the summit of the hill up which his tired beasts were slowly creeping, of a horseman, looming to the height of a Doone warrior against the evening sky. Was he friend or foe?

My brave aunt, who made moan over nothing, sat up, breathing a little quicker. My heart gave a wild bound

Page 113 as I grasped my pistol. All I could think of was what a perfectly horrible thing it would be to have to fire it against live flesh and blood! I, who had seen and dressed so many wounds! What a relief to us and our chicken-hearted driver when the stranger announced himself a Confederate scout who hadn’t had a mouthful of food that day! How joyfully we watched him clutch at the remainder of our luncheon and eat it like a hungry wolf! How good to hear that the big railway bridge over the Rappahannock was but a mile beyond, and that the way was clear, with General Lee’s outpost pickets on the farther side! “But I misdoubt your crossin’ that there ford to-night, ladies,” were his last disheartening words as we parted company.

Alas! it was too true. The Rappahannock, swelled to fury by spring rains, was now a tearing, resistless yellow flood, the ford invisible. And now our driver rose and asserted his manhood. Go back we must and would. If we liked, he’d take us “to the nighest house,” some five miles in our rear.

Upon the far side of the maddened stream we could plainly see the camp-fires of our pickets. How to reach them, we knew not; but turn back - no!

Our driver paid and in the act of swift retreat, our trunks and bags piled under the stone buttress of the bridge, we climbed the steep bank and stood upon the track above, straining our eyes in the direction where we fain would be. In vain did I throw all the vigor of strong lungs into a halloo for notice. The rush of the river drowned my attempts, and it was growing dark. The Rappahannock bridge, subsequently burnt by military order, was then the highest and longest on the lines of the Orange and Alexandria Road. There was no way of crossing it save by stepping from tie to tie of the

Page 114 railway. When I proposed essaying this, for the first time Mrs. Hyde’s courage failed her. Over that raging river she could not walk without vertigo, and how could she let a young girl go alone?

The irreverent answer was that there were times when a girl with a steady brain and a light foot was worth any chaperon! And before the dear, alarmed lady could cry out, I was off skipping across the ties, till about the middle of the bridge the pickets espied me and sent forth a mighty shout.

Three or four of them came running to meet me and hear my tale. They said they were never more astonished than to look up and see a young lady coming, at that hour, apparently alone, out of the forsaken waste of country beyond the bridge. They had had no order from the general, but there was a house near their picket post where we could put up for the night. After that all became easy work in our eyes. Two of the troopers brought my aunt across between them, others followed with our belongings. At their little camp by the track over the water’s edge we were mounted on peaked saddles, upon rawboned horses, and led along an unspeakably muddy road, a big cavalryman loaded down with our rugs, bags, and bandboxes bringing up the rear. At the farm-house where they asked shelter for us the good woman fairly embraced us in her hospitality. Cut off in that lonely world, where battles, raids, and skirmishes were her only excitement, we were a godsend. So eager was she to ask questions, we could hardly eat the bacon and corn-bread she offered for answering them. Warmed by a fire of pine knots, washed and comforted, we sank at last into a feather-bed in the loft, with heartfelt gratitude to God that we were safe at last in dear, war-worn old Dixie!

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Toward morning our sleep was broken by a noise as of thunder beneath our windows - wheels, shouts, the tramp of horses’ feet, the ring of soldiers’ steel - what was it? Broad awake and up in the moment, we believed a skirmish to be in progress. But leaning from the window we espied in the gray dawn our host in colloquy with a Confederate uniform, and the little house yard completely filled with gray troopers dismounting around an empty ambulance. The happy truth flashed upon us! This was our ambulance, our guard, sent by our loyal friend, the general, to convoy us to our original starting point! Hurrah for General Fitz!

Page 116 CHAPTER VI

OUR “On to Washington” experience was a nine days’ wonder among our friends in Richmond, and for a brief space I enjoyed distinction as an arbiter of fashion, resulting from possession of a new hat and gown, boots and gloves, all at once. My few fineries, snatched from the protesting clutch of Uncle Sam, were handed about to be copied, till I feared they would be worn out. My mother having withdrawn for a while from her hospital work, we enjoyed a semblance of home in the portion of a dwelling in Third Street, kindly leased to us by the friends who owned it. We had a large sitting-room with a pantry back of it. In this we received visitors and took our meals, prepared by our friend’s negro cook in the kitchen in the backyard. Upstairs were our bedrooms and bath. My cousin Hetty Cary, returning again from Baltimore, had rejoined us. My brother, who had been at Charleston doing guard-boat duty at the time of the first attack on Sumter by the ironclad fleet - lying night after night in a small boat upon an open sea, rocking on the waves, listening intently for a movement from the enemy - was ordered back to Richmond, to the school-ship Patrick Henry, on the James.

There, as adjutant of the ship, he had sometimes occasion to read out his own name in the punishment list, for the offences of smoking, laughing in section-room, etc. The Navy Department had wisely decided not to allow its little kiddies to grow up only in the school of

Page 117 arms. To his rations of “real” tea and coffee saved for his mother, we were indebted for the only taste of those props of feminine existence that we enjoyed till the end of the war. We had eggs, butter, potatoes, salt meat, and rice in abundance, but almost no butcher’s meat or fowls. My mother catered for us, and we fared well, though by then had set in the period when it was said a citizen went to market with his money in a market basket and brought home his provisions in his pocket-book. It is certain I could not write a war book and omit that anecdote! Watercresses were the only green things visible at market, and they were actually cheap. The precious bluebacks of Confederate currency became alarmingly plentiful and secured for us less and less. Early in the war there had been a brief period of “individual” notes, quickly suppressed by government. We had a good laugh at finding in our honored mother’s purse, whither it had drifted with some change, one of these, inscribed: “Good for one drink. John Smith.”

One of our former boarding-house hostesses had offered to supply our little mיnage with china and glass, not to be bought at any price in Richmond. We accepted gratefully, and for a brief time enjoyed the luxury of French porcelain plates and cups, when one day arrived a messenger requesting the immediate return of these articles, as an accident had occurred in which all of Mrs. –‘s were broken. Back went the borrowed glory, and that day we dined upon tin plates, with our salt and pepper in cocked-hat dishes made of writing-paper. Another family had, in this fashion, to give up a borrowed dining-table at the very moment when their invited guests had just seated themselves around it.

Letter-paper became desperately scarce. To Burton Harrison I was indebted for the gift of a large package

Page 118 of cream laid paper with envelopes to match, which took the place on my writing-table of a pile of prescription blanks presented to me by a doctor in a hospital, used with envelopes made of wall-paper, the pattern side within. Mr. Harrison said he was protecting himself against excuses for non-response to notes. Wall-paper served also for the binding of some of Miss M�hlbach’s works, and of a translation from Victor Hugo, welcomed in the army under the popular title of “Lee’s Miserables” (“Les Misיrables”).

I suppose, in view of the amount of ink-splashing afterward perpetrated, I may be excused for saying that before this time I had begun to write stories, verses, and sketches which the editors of various war papers flattered me by consenting to print. The Southern Illustrated News, the “Best Family Journal in the Confederacy,” edited by Messrs. Ayers and Wade, had for its “regular contributors” Messrs. John R. Thompson, John Esten Cooke, Harry Timrod, James Barron Hope, and Paul H. Hayne, certainly a list of important and charming writers. The News, “sent to all parts of the Confederacy at ten dollars a year,” paid me my first literary checks. The paper on which it was printed was yellow and coarse, and the illustrations, mainly of generals in the field, made those hopes of our nation look like brigands and cutthroats of the deepest dye. The Magnolia Weekly, “A Home Journal of Literature and General News,” was the other patron of my budding literary ambition. Both of these weeklies struggled under the drawback of having the military authorities of Richmond descend at any moment and drag off editors, printers, engravers, and contributors to delve in the mud of trenches or to stand guard around the prisons and bridges of the Confederate capital. At that

Page 119 peremptory call of the alarm bell Richmond learned to know so well, the entire staff of the two periodicals often had to forsake office duty and be absent for an indefinite time. During the summer of 1864 there were many suspensions of publication, but the work began again in October, 1864, and continued I know not how long, to the satisfaction of camps and citizens.

The greatest feather in my literary cap, however, I conceived to be an appearance in verse in the columns of the critical Examiner, of which people stood in awe for the caustic utterances of its editor, Mr. John M. Daniel, on subjects military and otherwise. I had met Mr. Daniel and considered him as unapproachable as the north pole was till recently; but, as has been proved, even the north pole has been misunderstood, and the Jove-like editor not only gave me a place on the editorial page, but came to call afterward, and continued to be a kind friend. The verses in question were the wail of a mother for a son shot in battle before Richmond. Probably I imitated Mrs. Browning, but without knowing it, for I always tried to write what I knew or could feel myself. I had shyly shown them first to our delightful next-door neighbor in lodgings, Mr. John Mitchel, the famous Irish agitator, whom we knew only as a kind-eyed, brown-bearded man, full of literary taste and culture, residing with his family to whom he was entirely devoted. To Mr. Mitchel I owed a range of new ideas. He superintended my reading and urged me to go on writing and to work hard. Mr. Daniel, too, gave me sane and strong counsel. My third literary godfather was Mr. John R. Thompson, former editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, of which Poe was the most illustrious contributor. Mr. Thompson wrote charming vers de sociיtי after the style of Austin Dobson.

Page 120 He was also a sort of laureate of the Confederacy, since to him were due many tender and graceful verses written and published in the daily press upon subjects of immediate public interest, like the death of army heroes and the winning of great battles. In 1864 he went to London to take an editorial position on The Index, a journal supported by the Confederate Government with the hope of inducing France and England to lend aid to its cause, and became also a leader writer on the London Standard. To reach a British port, he ran out of Wilmington in a Confederate blockade-runner, slept on a cotton bale, was chased by a United States steamer, but reached Bermuda safely. There he took the British mail-packet for Halifax, thence went by the Asia to Liverpool. From London, he made visits to aristocratic country houses in Scotland and Ireland, and on returning to town in the autumn, surrounded himself with a circle of friends comprising Tennyson, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, Bulwer, Lord Donoughmore, Lord Houghton, the Duke of Sutherland, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, Disraeli, Dickens, Mowbray Morris, editor-in-chief of the London Times, Woolner, Millais, Charles Kingsley, Dean and Lady Stanley, Lady Augusta Stanley (then lady in waiting to Queen Victoria), who entertained him at luncheon at Windsor Castle; Dowager Marchioness of Bath, a warm friend of the Confederacy; Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Sartoris, Sir Edwin Landseer, Lady Georgiana Fane, the Countess of Harrington, and many others. An account in his diary of this time described drinking tea and spending the evening with Thomas Carlyle at 5 Cheyne Row, on October 14, 1864.

“Mrs. Carlyle has been for some time an invalid, but made her appearance. Lady Ashburton and Miss Baring

Page 121 came in after tea. Mr. Carlyle said it was his habit to drink five cups of tea. He ran off into table-talk about tea and coffee, told us that he had found in Lord Russell’s ‘Memoirs of Moore,’ which he called a rubbishy book, the origin of the word biggin; it comes from one Biggin, a tinner, who first made the vessel and was knighted afterwards. Then he talked of pipes and tobacco and recited the old verse, ‘Think this, and smoke tobacco.’ There was but one honest pipe made in Britain - by a Glasgow man, who used a clay found in Devonshire. Mr. Carlyle enquired about the Confederacy, its resources, army, its supplies of food and powder. He read a letter from Emerson in which the Yankee philosopher declared that the struggle now going on was the battle of humanity. When we rose to say good night, he called a servant for his coat and boots (he had received us in dressing-gown and slippers), and walked with us within a stone’s throw of Grosvenor Hotel, two miles, at half past eleven. On the way passing Chelsea Hospital, he burst into a tribute to Wren the architect, of whom he said there was a rare harmony, a sweet veracity, in all his work. We mentioned Tennyson, and he spoke with great affection of him, but thought him inferior to Burns: he had known ‘Alfred’ for years; said he used to come in hob-nailed boots and rough coat, to blow a cloud with him. Carlyle said he thought Mill’s book on Liberty the greatest nonsense he had ever read, and spoke despairingly of the future of Great Britain: too much money would be the ruin of the land.”

On October 31,1864: “At Carlyle’s, who made many enquiries about Lee, whom he greatly admires.”

Again on May 17, 1865: “Went to Chelsea. Mr. Carlyle amused us very much by his comments on the

Page 122 proclamation of (President) Johnson. He styled him a sanguinary tailor seated on Olympus.”

On November 15, 1865: “Called on Carlyle. Found the Irish patriot, Gavan Duffy there. Carlyle gave us a graphic account of a visit to the thieves quarter at Whitechapel. He also spoke of the great ignorance of the educated classes in England and Germany, of German history and literature.”

On January 25, 1866: “Called at Cheyne Row. Found Carlyle in the best of humours. He gave us an account of the rise of Chartism in England. He denounced the Emperor Napoleon and John Bright with equal severity, and said while there was not one noble soul to be found in all France, England had become a great, horrible discordant blacksmith’s shop.”

On June 1, 1866: “Met in Hyde Park Carlyle, the first time since the death of his wife. We walked as far as Brompton Road. He talked with all his peculiar brilliancy - speaking of Jefferson Davis he declared that looking at the war from first to last, Davis seemed to him one of the manliest actors in it, and whatever the jury might say on his trial, the grand jury of mankind had already declared him not guilty.”

In Carlyle’s “Reminiscences,” edited by Froude, occurs this passage concerning Mrs. Carlyle’s sympathy with the South: “Amongst other last things she told me that evening was, with deep sympathy: ‘Mr. Thompson’ (a Virginian who sometimes came) ‘called one night; he says there is little doubt they will hang President Davis!’ Upon which I almost resolved to write a pamphlet upon it, had not I myself been so ignorant about the matter, so foreign to the whole fratricidal ‘war’ (as they call it); self-murder of a million brother Englishmen for the sake of sheer phantasms and totally

Page 123 false theories upon the Nigger, as I had reckoned it - and that probably I should do poor Davis nothing but harm.”

On the 15th of June, in the same year, Thompson makes another visit to Chelsea, when he saw Carlyle’s brother and his niece, Mrs. Welsh. “Mr. Carlyle said it seemed to him men were bent on reversing the idea of a millennium, which was to lock up the devil a thousand years, and were going to give him a free passage to do his worst on earth.”

A portion of Mr. Thompson’s diary was edited and published by his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, author of several vigorous novels, and wife of Richard Henry Stoddard, the poet. Thompson was a great deal at their house when he lived, after the war, in New York, as an associate editor of the Evening Post. Mrs. Stoddard mentioned to me an entry in the journal of a check, “the proceeds of a poem on the obsequies of General Stuart,” sent to me, but “never received.”

I explained to her that there was some mistake about this, since I have now in my album the letter accompanying the check sent as an offering to my work in the hospitals. Mr. Thompson was present at my marriage and wrote an account of it (strictly without names). He did not live long enough after that, poor fellow, in his adopted Northern home to become the frequenter of our house my husband and I would both have wished him to be, for a sweeter-tempered man and one more pleasingly in love with literature never lived, than he!

To Mr. Thompson I was indebted not only for guidance of my taste in reading and research, but for a steady provision of English classics from the State Library, weekly piled upon my table. I read constantly, and

Page 124 studied. We had almost no ephemeral publications, therefore no temptation to stray out of the straight and narrow path of standard literature. I studied French, Italian, and Spanish, and no day passed in which I did not write something. I think, in this connection, the distinguished trio of advisers who protected my juvenile efforts in literature must have felt they had pulled a string of a shower-bath from the scribblings that presently poured from my pen. To these productions I began by signing the name “Refugitta,” meaning “Exile.” From letters received from friends across the line, I invented a “Blockade Correspondence” between “Secessia,” in Baltimore, and “Refugitta,” in Richmond, published in the Southern Illustrated News. In one of these letters, dated 1864, “Secessia” advises her blockaded friend to read “Russell’s Snobbish Diary, “Barren Honour,’” by the author of that “nice, naughty, ‘Guy Livingston,’” and especially “Orley Farm,” by Anthony Trollope; Lever’s “Barrington,” and Miss Mulock’s “Mistress and Maid.” She is in despair because the dear Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has called us Southerners “Lords of the Lash,” but hopes he will live to repent. She describes the newest method of hairdressing, styled “rats and mice” - the forelock rolled back, the back hair parted and rolled forward, a “cache peigne” of ribbon or flowers in the middle of the head behind; also the new bonnets, off the head two inches at the top, filled with tulle ruching, in which rest full-blown roses. She announces that high-necked ball dresses are coming in, and raves over a bewitching pair of Paris boots with scarlet heels and a ruche of black satin ribbon about the ankle! She ridicules the New York public for going wild about the marriage at Grace Church, superintended by Brown and Barnum, of Tom

Page 125 Thumb and his bride; says the last mode for dessert in Paris is to have strawberries growing in pots placed before each guest at table; and describes the travelling gown of the new Princess of Wales as “a silk Victoria tartan dress, trimmed around the skirt with a full row of black velvet, a jacket of silver grey poplin, and a bonnet of white crךpe, without a veil.”

“Refugitta,” in return, narrates the difficulties of getting anything at all to wear or to eat in Richmond, describes the thrilling passage through the town of shabby, war-worn, hungry troops, a thousand times dearer and more welcome than in their days of gold lace and glitter; the amusing attempts of the women to turn old rags into new garments; quotes Southey’s north countrywoman’s directions to her tailor: “Here, talleor, tak this petcut; thoo mun bind me’t, and thoo mun tap-bind me’t; thoo mun turn it rongsid afoor, tapsid bottom, insid oot.” Next, “Secessia” is made to feel that for all the fashions of Paris and New York combined, Richmond girls would not exchange the chance of receiving flying visits from Uncle Robert’s boys in gray uniforms, however threadbare and smoke-stained from a hundred fights.

“Refugitta,” in passing, makes note of a cruel disappointment endured by the maidens of Richmond for whose entertainment had been planned, by the gallant and plucky Jenkins’s brigade of South Carolina stationed near town, a tournament in which the prowess of Ivanhoe and Brian de Bois Guilbert were to be emulated. “Expectation was on tiptoe, when the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold; in plain words, General Elzey, Mr. Seddon, and other hard-hearted officials, shut down a lid upon our hopes, and ordered the brigade away!”

Page 126

A mixing of metaphors does not yet seem to have been eliminated from the style of the young aspirant for literary place!

That spring we rode a great deal to the battle-fields below Richmond, sometimes in sight of the Union picket lines. My companion in these expeditions was now and then the private secretary of the President, sitting erect and easily upon his gallant gray; but this was only when his chief would let him off from the afternoon rides that wore out the patience of the staff.

Sometimes there was an excursion by steamer down the James, to Drury’s Bluff and beyond, including all the people who made up gay society (a misnomer that, when a sigh followed almost every smile!) chaperoned by Mrs. Davis, or Mrs. Mallory, the wife of the Secretary of the Navy. Our favorite walks were in the direction of Hollywood and on to the bank of the canal above the turbulent rapids of the James.

We received many visitors in our little mיnage, and shared our ups and downs of housekeeping with some stately and important personages.

Charles Godfrey Leland has said that “every brain is like a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a beehive. It is thought that no man, however learned or experienced he might be, ever contrived during all his life to so much as even half fill the cells of his memory. Yes, they are all there - every image of the past, every face which has ever smiled on us - every line read in print, every picture, every face and house is there–-“

It is certain that since I began to write these pages, memory has summoned up for me many names, persons, and circumstances of my early youth that had been overlaid by a thousand succeeding impressions, and apparently forgotten.

Page 127

I will try to extract from my honey-comb some of the personalities of the war. But as I am just now writing currente calamo, with a few old letters and jottings of a girl’s diary to draw upon, I must take them as they come.

Our most illustrious caller that spring was the commander-in-chief of the Army of Northern Virginia. General Lee came one evening, and after a pleasant talk with my mother and me, arose to go, we escorting him to the front door. It was broad moonlight, and I recall as if it were yesterday the superb figure of our hero standing in the little porch without, saying a few last words as he swung his military cape around his shoulders. It did not need my fervid imagination to think him the most noble looking mortal I had ever seen. As he swept off his hat for a second and final farewell, he bent down and kissed me as he often did the girls he had known from their childhood. At that time General Lee was literally the idol of the Confederacy. His moral grandeur, recognized by all, lifted him into the region where “Envy, nor calumny, nor hate, nor pain” did not venture to assail him. We felt, as he left us and walked off up the quiet leafy street in the moonlight, that we had been honored as by more than royalty.

We went often to Mrs. Davis’s receptions, where the President never failed to say kind words in passing, and sometimes to tarry for a pleasant chat. Always grave, always looking as if he bore the sorrows of a world, he was invariably courteous and sometimes playful in his talk with very young women. These entertainments of Mrs. Davis, in the evening between limited hours, were attended by every one not in deep mourning. The lady of the Confederate White House, while not always sparing of witty sarcasms upon those who had affronted

Page 128 her, could be depended upon to conduct her salon with extreme grace and conventional ease. Her sister, Margaret Howell, aided to lend it brilliancy.

To one of these receptions, Hetty and I had accepted the escort of a captain, convalescent after the loss of a leg in service, who, poor fellow, was rejoicing in the possession of a new artificial leg of the latest pattern, with all modern improvements, which had reached him through the blockade. We had all three walked together through the dimly lit streets for but a short distance, when our escort gave signs of distress - halted, begged our pardon, stammered, then declared he could go no farther, as his leg had “come unstrapped.” The street was empty of passers, and we, filled with dismay at our inability to serve, could but aid him to back up against a house wall and, one on either side of him, stand there almost crying through sympathy, to await the arrival of assistance. After a long delay, some officers came up, by whom we were relieved of our charge and finally convoyed to the President’s house.

Mrs. Semmes, wife of the Louisiana senator, a handsome woman with a gift for tragic acting that might have carried her far upon the stage, gave an evening of charades in pantomime. Mrs. Chestnut had asked to call and take me there, “in a carriage” - a great event, as we usually walked everywhere! Until I read her diary, published long after her death, I had no idea of the marital discussion that had gone on between her husband and her lively self about the price of that carriage - “twenty-five dollars for the evening!” When she arrived at our house we had just been hearing from Von Borcke about the compliment paid him by Congress the day before, a vote of “thanks of the country to Major Hיros von Borcke.” He blushed tremendously

Page 129 as always when we praised him. I think he and young Preston Hampton were also asked by Mrs. Chestnut to share in the transit to the party in that twenty-five dollar carriage. She was so delightful we did not care if we never got there. In her diary, she says she sent it back for her husband, who brought Hetty Cary and Mr. Tucker, so it certainly did duty as an omnibus.

When we reached the Semmes’, the drawing-rooms were crowded with smart people, the President and Mrs. Davis, Mr. Benjamin, the silver-tongued Secretary of State, Mr. and Mrs. Mallory and their sparkling little Ruby, with all the high world of the government. When it came my turn to perform (in something forgotten, where I wore a cap and apron and carried a duster), they had to wrench me away from a lively and pleasant conversation with the President, whom I was trying to amuse between the acts.

Of that performance, easily the best feature was the strong realistic acting of the hostess; and we considered it an achievement that she had induced the hitherto haughty and unyielding secretary of the President not only to appear in such things at all, but to cut off his mustache in order to be Eleazar to her Rebecca at the Well. Long after, when my husband consented to put on an Arab sheik’s costume to please us, in Jerusalem, I was reminded of his attire in the Semmes’ tableaux, made up by Mrs. Davis and Miss Howell from Oriental shreds and patches found about the house.

General Stuart was, I think, one of their performers; a tremendous card for the management when induced to stalk through a pilgrimage scene and lay his sword at the foot of a votive cross; then Mr. Cooper de Leon, in gloom and chains, represented so thrillingly a condemned prisoner in Bridewell as to leave the audience

Page 130 inconsolable till the lights were turned up again. And lastly, the evening was made memorable by a supper from the hands of a chef; not a supper of makeshifts and dire disappointments to the palate, but a genuine old-time banquet.

One of the most picturesque and royally remembered figures of our war was that same Prussian baron, Lieutenant-Colonel Hיros von Borcke, serving as a volunteer on Stuart’s staff. When he first appeared among us, in the spring of 1863, he was a giant in stature, blond and virile, with great curling golden mustaches, and the expression in his wide-open blue eyes of a singularly modest boy. It was said that he rode on the biggest horse and wielded the heaviest sabre in the army, making his appearance in skirmish or battle a living terror to his enemy. Holding, from the first, high place in the esteem of his fellow-officers and superiors, Von Borcke, whom the troopers styled “Major Bandbox,” won brilliant renown in service, and was equally popular in society in Richmond. To dance with him in the swift-circling, never-reversing German fashion was a breathless experience, and his method of avoiding obstacles in the ballroom was simply to lift his partner off her feet, without altering his step, and deposit her in safety farther on. Poor Von Borcke received a dangerous wound in the throat in battle, and was nursed back to life again by the family of the late Professor Thomas R. Price, of Columbia, then resident near Richmond. He went back into service, despite the fact that “my bullet,” as he always called it, was never removed and became liable, upon any unusual exertion, to move its position and threaten to choke him. Once, when sitting in our drawing-room, he insisted upon leaning over the back of a sofa to pick up a wandering thimble from

Page 131 the floor, the effort bringing on a frightful fit of coughing and struggling for breath, which my dear mother dealt with skilfully, while we girls assisted with tears streaming from our eyes. I have pictures of Von Borcke before and after his wound, the first of the Athos, Porthos and Aramis variety of manly hero, the last painfully thin and emaciated. It was some consolation to his friends in the South when, after having fought with distinction in the Franco-Prussian War, married and settled upon his ancestral estates in Pomerania, Colonel von Borcke returned to visit America, displaying far more than his original supply of avoirdupois. An absence in Europe at this time prevented our claiming the pleasure of receiving him at our home. His own account of his adventures in our war was published soon after it in Blackwood’s Magazine. He died some years since, but it is certain that no hero of our side has been more treasured in memory both for his dashing feats at arms and his lovable qualities of mind and heart than he.

Prince Camille de Polignac, who as readily adapted himself to our simple ways in Richmond as he had done to the courts of Europe, was much liked in our society. I can still remember his look of sudden dismay when a guileless Richmond hostess, at the end of an evening party, asked him if he would “mind seeing” a certain young lady “home.” This meant a sufficiently long walk, without chaperon, through the dim streets, but the prince acquiesced gravely, and wrapping his Napoleonic cloak around him, he strode majestically beside his charge, hardly speaking till he deposited her at the parental door.

A very handsome and plucky young Englishman, Lord Edward St. Maur, of the Duke of Somerset’s family,

Page 132 who had come to America with the Marquis of Hartington, appeared in Richmond in the spring of 1862, and bore himself with gallantry under hot fire with Longstreet at the battle known as “Frayser’s Farm,” or “Glendale,” soon afterward going by flag of truce into the Union lines, and returning to England to the regret of Richmond people who had hoped to see more of him. General Moxley Sorrel records that Lord Edward met the sad fate of being mauled and eaten by a tiger while hunting big game in India.

Colonel Garnet Wolseley, of the British army, now Viscount Wolseley, who has endeared himself to all Southerners of the true faith by his splendid eulogies of Lee - ranking him with Marlborough and Wellington - made a flying visit to the Confederacy, coming through from Canada where he was then stationed. “Praise from Sir Hubert,” are Lord Wolseley’s words of the Southern leaders, since he has himself climbed to the pinnacle of the ladder of fame in military service, and is now field-marshal in the British army.

The Hon. Francis Lawley, correspondent in the Confederacy for the London Times, is cordially remembered among the survivors of the Southern friends whose cause he so generously espoused.

Frank Vizitelly, correspondent and artist for the London Illustrated News, could hardly have been called a “ladies’ man,” but we nevertheless met him several times and were immensely entertained by his varied accomplishments. He was a big, florid, red-bearded Bohemian, of a type totally unfamiliar to us Virginians, who could and would do anything to entertain a circle. In our theatricals, tableaux, and charades, he was a treasure-trove. Everything we proposed was according to what they had done in London in the theatrical club

Page 133 of which Charles Dickens was the shining light, and we, of course, bowed before his superior knowledge. He painted our scenery and faces, made wigs and armor, and was a mine of suggestion in stage device. He sang songs, told stories, danced pas seuls, and was generally most kind and amusing. The men said he was very plucky in the saddle and on the battle-field. Later in life, we heard of him in wars here, there, and everywhere, in the service of the London Illustrated News. To our regret, we learned of his death under Hicks Pasha, in the Soudan, and were glad to find his name inscribed with honor on a memorial tablet set in the wall of grand old St. Paul’s in London.

At the time of which I am now writing, Lieutenant-Colonel Freemantle, of the British Coldstream Guards, had not yet come to Richmond, where he afterward joined General Lee’s army and went with it in the disastrous invasion of Pennsylvania. No one ever heard Colonel Freemantle spoken of by his Southern comrades save in terms of enthusiastic praise. When he went back to England after this campaign, his book, “Three Months in the Southern States,” was published, making its way to the Confederacy, where its charming spirit and interesting presentment of the situation was greatly welcomed. By the next season we were all eagerly reading this brochure reprinted in Mobile for circulation in the army. During the remainder of his life Sir Arthur Lyon-Freemantle, K.C.M.G., held distinguished place in the British army and was during four years Governor of Malta, a place of highest honor in his Majesty’s service.

To return to our pseudo-housekeeping in Third Street. One day when we had been giving tea to a

Page 134 party of friends, I left my mother and cousin to entertain them, while I, as we had only half the service of a maid, retired into the pantry to wash the tea things for a second use. Little Mr. de St. Martin, always merry and helpful, insisted upon following me to volunteer in drying the cups and saucers, so I equipped him with a long white apron and bestowed on him a tea towel. While busily engaged he and I did not observe that the pantry door was softly opened, until a burst of laughter revealed my cousin Hetty and several of our callers standing there making sport of us!

In that same pantry I had rather a startling experience. Coming home late from a party where, as usual, there was no supper, after we had gone to our rooms, I ran downstairs to get some food to stay the cravings of our ever keen appetites. On lighting the gas, I immediately saw that the window looking upon the back was open at the bottom, the sill clutched by ten vigorous black fingers. What to do cost me a momentary pang. But I reflected that the town was full of half-starved, marauding negroes, and that, in any case, I would get nothing by crying out. So, appearing to have noticed nothing, I pulled down the window with a slam, and the fingers withdrew suddenly. I locked the sash at the top, lowered the blind carelessly left up, secured my plate of cold corn-dodgers, put out the gas, then tore, breathless, palpitating, and scared to death, upstairs to rejoin my comrades. All together, we looked out into the darkness of the yard, but our robber had already climbed the fence and taken to his heels.

The reign of expedients in food had now begun. We had pork enough in different forms, potatoes, bread, and eggs (did we not practice the one hundred different ways of cooking an egg?). For sweets, there were pies

Page 135 made with dried fruit, or cakes with black sorghum molasses in lieu of sugar, chopped dried peaches in place of currants, dried orange-peel making believe it was citron, and dried apples doing their best, but failing, to masquerade as raisins.

Ladies plaited straw hats around the evening lamp. Von Borcke, waxing enthusiastic about a Confederate bride whom he had seen, declared: “Ach, she was most beautiful in von spun-home dress and von self-made hat!” We sewed dreadful-looking gloves of chamois leather, cut by a pattern handed from friend to friend. Some made shoes that others declared they would sooner by far go barefoot than appear in. As loot from the battle-fields, young men passed on to their sweethearts presents of toilet-soap, combs and brushes, needlebooks (ah! so carefully made for the out-going soldier in far-away Northern homes!), scissors, pins. On the retreat from Maryland in the previous autumn, yards of calico, rolls of tape, and spools of sewing cotton, had been tucked into knapsacks to be gratefully received by wives, mothers, and daughters of the soldiers.

Thanks to my shopping in Washington, I had gloves in plenty, but shoes were sadly lacking. When Captain Joseph Denטgre said blushingly that he had received a pair of ladies’ boots by blockade from Nassau, intended for his sister in New Orleans, which since he could not possibly get them to her, he would presume to offer to me, never was gift more gladly welcomed! Earlier in the war, Paul Morphy, the celebrated chess-player, whom we knew in Richmond, accepted a commission to purchase for me in New Orleans, whither he was returning, a French voilette of real black thread lace, the height of my ambition. When the veil arrived,

Page 136 as selected by himself, we voted Mr. Morphy an expert in other arts than chess.

We even heard of a private in the Confederate ranks bringing back from Maryland a pair of stays, which he presented to his fiancיe. One remembers when Mr. Jefferson was minister to France, a young lady in America commissioning him to buy for her the latest fashion in corsets, he complying gracefully, and writing in return: “Should they be too small, you will be good enough to lay them by awhile, as there are ebbs as well as flows in this world.” A blockade-runner, coming in to a Southern port, brought, instead of arms and drugs, an entire cargo of corsets sold out at great profit by the venturer who had stocked her! For women must lace, while men will fight, might have been a motto of the hour!

Page 137 CHAPTER VII

DARK days were in store for Richmond. An incipient bread riot occurred in her streets in April, when a large number of women and children of the poorer class met and marched through Main and Cary streets, attacking and sacking several stores kept by known speculators. President Davis, Governor Letcher, General Elzey, and General Winder, with Mr. Seddon, Secretary of War, met the painful situation by prompt but kind measures and personal appeal. Rations of rice issued by the government aided to calm the disturbance, which left, however, a distressing impression upon all minds.

A thrilling day for us was the Sunday of Stoneman’s raid, when, as usual, a large congregation met at St. Paul’s Church, remaining for the communion service. We knew that a big and terrible fight was on at Chancellorsville, in which sons, husbands, brothers of many of the people present were engaged. Outside in the soft spring air, a tumult of war sounds continually distracted our thoughts and racked our nerves. The marching of armed men, the wheels of wagons containing shot and shell, the clash of iron gates in the Capitol Square opposite, went on without ceasing, while repeatedly messengers came up the aisle touching some kneeling or sitting worshipper on the shoulder, a summons responded to by an electric start, and then the hurried departure of shocked, pallid people from the church. These were the calls to come and receive some beloved

Page 138 one brought in dead or wounded from the field. To the rector of the church, Dr. Minnegerode, in the act of administering the sacrament with another clergyman, the sexton carried and delivered at the altar rails one of these dread messages, at once obeyed by the father whose son was reported dead and awaiting him at the railway station. A great weight was lifted from the congregation when the rector, looking dreadfully shaken but relieved, came back to resume his interrupted service. It was the corpse of another volunteer whom they had mistaken for his boy.

Nothing in the war, perhaps, excepting the surrender, ever struck Richmond with such stunning force as the announcement of Stonewall Jackson’s fall, of the amputation of his arm, and finally of his death, following the battle of Chancellorsville. Even the brilliant victory of our arms was in total eclipse by this irreparable loss. From the first, when the shy Puritan professor of the Virginia Military Institute had startled the armies by his extraordinary daring and military skill, Jackson had taken hold of the popular mind as a supreme favorite. “Old Stonewall,” “Old Jack,” or “Old Blue Light” was by the soldiers held in the reverence bestowed by Napoleon’s grenadiers upon the person of their sacred emperor. With Lee and Jackson to the fore, quiet people sitting in their homes felt themselves behind two massive towers of strength and meeting every adverse wind.

Because it has somewhat passed out of memory, I insert here Dr. J. W. Palmer’s stirring lyric, “Stonewall Jackson’s Way.” No man who writes a taking war song can realize its power until he hears it soar up in a mighty chorus of men’s voices, fired by its eloquence. How many a time have I played the accompaniment

Page 139 for this, sitting at the piano, surrounded by a ring of bronzed, rusty, gray-coated veterans, young in years but old in bloody service, singing with martial fire! It was set to music, by whom I know not, as I have lost my copy of the song. STONEWALL JACKSON’S WAY FOUND ON THE BODY OF A SERGEANT OF THE OLD STONEWALL BRIGADE, WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA.

Come, stack arms, men! Pile on the rails;

Stir up the camp fire bright;

No matter if the canteen fails,

We’ll make a warring night.

Here Shenandoah brawls along,

There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong

To swell the Brigade’s rousing song

Of “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

We see him now! - the old slouched hat

Cocked o’er his eye askew -

The shrewd dry smile - the speech as pat -

So calm, so blunt, so true.

The Blue Light Elder knows o’er well;

Says he, “That’s Banks - he’s fond of shell,

Lord save his soul! - we’ll give him - well,

That’s Stonewall Jackson’s way!”

Silence! ground arms. Kneel all! Caps off!

Old Blue Light’s going to pray.

Strangle the fool that dares to scoff!

Attention! it’s his way.

Appealing from his native sod

In forma pauperis to God -

Lay bare thine arm; stretch forth thy rod,

Amen! That’s Stonewall’s way.

Page 140

He’s in the saddle now. Fall in

Steady - the whole brigade!

Hill’s at the ford cut off. We’ll win

His way out, ball and blade.

What matter if our shoes are worn;

What matter if our feet are torn,

“Quick step,” we’re with him before dawn.

That’s Stonewall Jackson’s way.

The sun’s bright lances rout the mists

Of morning, and by George

There’s Longstreet struggling in the lists,

Hemmed in an ugly gorge.

Pope and his Yankees, whipped before,

“Bay’net and grape,” hear Stonewall roar.

“Charge Stuart! Pay off Ashby’s score,”

In Stonewall Jackson’s way.

Ah! maiden, wait and watch, and yearn,

For news of Stonewall’s band.

Ah! widow! read with eyes that burn

That ring upon thy hand.

Ah! wife, sew on, pray on, hope on,

Thy life shall not be all forlorn;

The foe had better ne’er been born

Than get in Stonewall’s way.

And now, Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s right arm, was dead of his wounds received, by the awful irony of Fate, at the hands of his own men. Dead? He, the stern Puritan leader, who, when he rose up from wrestling in prayer, launched himself like a destroying thunderbolt against the foe! He, whose sword never lay idle in its scabbard, whose iron frame had not once sought repose during all those months of fighting - who saved the day at Manassas, by standing like a stone wall and won

Page 141 himself a deathless sobriquet; who had fought and won so many desperate fights, independently, in the Valley; who had smitten McClellan’s flank with fury at Seven Pines - Jackson, to follow whom the flower of our Southern youths were proud to suffer all things - this, indeed, was a blow under which his country staggered.

When they brought his body from the place of his death to Richmond, all citizens were in the streets, standing uncovered, silent or weeping bitterly, to see the funeral train pass to the Capitol.

We were admitted privately late at night into the hall, where the great leader lay in state. Two guards, pacing to and fro in the moonlight streaming through high windows, alone kept watch over the hero. A lamp burned dimly at one end of the hall, but we saw distinctly the regular white outline of the quiet face in its dreamless slumber.

How still he lay, the iron chieftain, the fierce, untiring rider of Valley raids! The Confederate flag that covered him was snowed under by the masses of white blossoms left that day by all the fair hands of Richmond, together with laurel wreaths and palms.

And then, Gettysburg! Mourning fell like a pall of crape over the entire South, even though beneath it hearts thrilled with deathless pride in the charge of Pickett’s Virginians.

In the middle of the hottest season of the year, Hetty and I went into King William County, far as yet from war’s alarms, to stay at an old house surrounded by plantations of sorghum and cotton, by means of which its owners hoped to resist the outside pressure of blockade. The cotton crop, unfamiliar to our eyes, was a beautiful one, from its blossoms of a delicate lemon tint, to the boll, opening to disclose a fairy fall of snow. We took our

Page 142 first lessons in spinning from an expert old darky woman in the “quarter,” and also in weaving the stuffs required to clothe the small army of blacks on the estate. In her cabin we tasted watermelon molasses, and were regaled with genuine ash-cake, wrapped in cabbage leaves, baked under hickory embers upon the hearth, and served with fresh butter and foaming milk, by way of what she called “des a little snack, honey, to keep yer strength up.”

What a pretty scene met our gaze as we stood in the doorway of the spinning-woman’s hut! Two rows of whitewashed cabins, bowered in foliage and overgrown with morning-glory and scarlet runner, each having its neat patch of ground with corn, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and cabbage - (“Their vegetables beat mine all hollow!” laughingly said the mistress of the house) - the walks between, like the floors of the cabins, swept as clean as the decks of a man-of-war. In chairs before their doors sat the patriarchs of both sexes, looking out for numerous little darkies who romped and kicked in the sunshine. No sign here of the horrors for which John Brown had died on the scaffold at Harper’s Ferry!

All my observation of the colored folk that summer kept me wondering if they could be happier free. For years after the war I kept coming upon wretched homesick specimens of their class in New York, praying aid and counsel of us Southerners of the old rיgime, in whom they instinctively trusted more than in their representative abolition friends. One of the best women I ever knew, a lecturer and missionary to her race, said to me once: “Some of these people call me ‘Miss’ and ask me to sit down in their grand parlors in satin chairs while they tell me how well off my people are. Your

Page 143 kind says, ‘You, Susan Jones! you’re just wet through, tramping the streets; go straight downstairs to my kitchen and get dry and have your dinner.’”

The maid specially detailed to attend to us at the “gret hus” came one night about nine o’clock to my room on the ground floor in the wing, to conduct me to the quarter where I had promised to read the Bible to a few “church members” in the cabin of our spinning friend. We went down long paths lit by the stars alone and embalmed with the scent of sweet flowers after dark; and to my dismay found the quarter in a state of advanced preparation for an “event.” The cabin where I was to read, its inner walls lined with pictures cut from magazines, was brilliant with the glare from pitch-pine torches set in the fireplace, while a couple of tallow candles, in brass candlesticks, illumined the pages of the Holy Book, laid open on a spotless pine table beside a split-bottomed armchair. Every available space inside and out of the house was filled with negroes in Sunday best, their black, cream, or chocolate faces looking in at windows and open door. In the foliage outside, fire-flies were glancing. Near by, a whippoorwill was calling. Not another sound broke the stillness as I, in great embarrassment, began to read.

Soon my equanimity was disturbed by an old woman who sat in the corner rocking her body to and fro. “That’s so! Bress Jesus!” she cried out piercingly, and this was the beginning of a fusillade of pious ejaculations, grunts, and moans, which I could end only by shutting the Book and desiring an ancient elder in their church to lead in prayer. Once I could repeat - I have forgotten them now - his words, extraordinarily picturesque, at times vividly eloquent. To my surprise, he prayed for the stricken Southern country and for

Page 144 “our pore sufferin’ soldiers in the camps and on the march.” He prayed for their “dear old mistis,” for everybody present, some specially mentioned, for their reader, in very flattering and touchingly grateful terms, and, lastly, for that “hoary old sinnah Uncle Si, settin’ ober da on his own do’-step this blessed minit, hearin’ what was read an’ scornin’ God’s Holy Word, he hade a-whitenin’ fur de grabe, he soul a-ripenin’ for hell’s dark do’.”

The climax bringing about a perfect tumult of groans and piously abusive comments upon pagan Uncle Si, I was able to make my escape. Susan told me afterward, that the quarter had “no use for Uncle Si, anyways” and had taken this occasion to administer a public rebuke. The meeting was kept up till nearly morning.

From that time I was always the recipient of smiles, kind words, and little gifts from the quarter. A wooden bowl of luscious peaches, fresh from the tree, would be poked through my open window of a morning; or flowers, a couple of fresh eggs, a bag of chenquapins, and even a fat sweet potato, left upon the sill.

The portly cook (whose price was far above rubies!) lost her husband, and on the following Sunday gave him an imposing funeral: returning from which she was escorted, arm-in-arm, by the deacon who had performed the ceremony, an enterprising fellow with an eye to the rich pickings from the “gret hus” kitchen. The following Sunday they were married amid much rejoicing. Emily, a trim little housemaid, used to petition me to write letters to her fiancי, Tom, a neighbor’s “boy,” who had followed his young master to the war. In one of these epistles I was requested, with many giggles, to tell Tom “yes, please, young mistis.” On beseeching her to supply words for this avowal, she threw her apron

Page 145 over her head and, tittering, observed: “Why, don’ you know, Miss? Jes’ de way you does it yerself!”

When I wound up the epistle by bidding Tom “God speed in his efforts to seek the bubble reputation in the quartermaster’s department,” and asked if she liked the phrase, Emily smiled rapturously. “Why, laws, Miss, I jes knowed you’d turn it off someway grand.” Another year, Emily and Tom waited on me in gratitude for my share in their newly wedded bliss.

We went to a “baptism” in a lovely mill-pond and saw the sable clergyman stand knee deep in water beside a little island, beckoning in one after another of the candidates. One of these, proving obstinate to his appeal, remained goggle-eyed upon the bank, staring toward the preacher, when the latter called out persuasively: “Why does yo’ tarry, brother? Why don’t yo’ come to glory? What is it that yo’ fear?”

“I’se afeard o’ that darned little moccasin on de lawg ‘longside o’ you,” was the answer, and with one bound, not stopping to look back, the celebrant gathered up his skirts and made for the shore and safety.

When we came to leave our sweet asylum for the stern realities and short commons of Richmond, there was an overhauling of our trunks to find what we could afford to give away to Susan and Emily, and an old crone from the quarter, tottering up to our outer door, looked in longingly at the unpacking. A certain antique petticoat of changeable pigeon’s-neck silk, used in some of my theatricals, captured her fancy mightily. (A similar one was offered me recently in the show-room of a fashionable dressmaker in Paris.) Finally, she told me if I would let her have it she would “pay me out” with a turkey sent to Richmond as soon as hers were fit to kill. I gave old Dilsey the garment and forgot it. In the late

Page 146 autumn one day, a quaint old back country wagon stopped at our door in town, and the darky driver brought in a box containing not only a splendid fat turkey, but a fine supply of sweet potatoes, some apples, and a bag of chestnuts, with “Dilsey’s service, please mistis, and she hopes you find them good eatin’.”

Good eating! Conquering a strong temptation to send the whole box to the hospital, we committed the rash act of giving a dinner party. None of us had in months tasted fowl of any kind, and the result was a dazzling success. The cordon bleu whose services we claimed covered herself with glory. I fail to recall any of the guests save our neighbor lodging in the same house, Mr. Robert Dobbin of Baltimore, who accepted, on condition that he might bring with him a round of Maryland spiced beef, which had just dropped like manna upon his path. He came, bearing his contribution in a large china dish, made himself most witty and agreeable, and at the close of our banquet withdrew, carrying the remainder of his beef, at my mother’s insistent request.

Upon our return to town that autumn, owing to General Meade’s ruminant attitude and the consequent inaction of our troops, the streets and our drawing-rooms were well filled with gray figures wearing stars, bars, scrolls, and other insignia of military rank. The daily increasing need of wearing apparel for women brought about a wide range of inventions to meet the demands of the entertainments, on all sides given and shared in. My one new evening dress of the war, bought in our raid on Washington and sent through the lines by friends, had been reserved for the smartest party of the season (given by the “Scotch” Allens in the spacious old house that sheltered Poe’s wayward youth, the home of his adoptive

Page 147 father, Mr. John Allen) where there was to be, wonder of wonders, a supper with, it was whispered by gossips, ten thousand dollars worth of champagne! My dearest mother had worked all day at the alterations necessary in my gown, and I entered the rooms feeling as much puffed up with pride as pet Marjorie’s turkey. In the agitation of offering some one beyond me in the supper-room a plate of real creamed oysters and chicken-salad, a man spilt its entire contents over my luckless gown, irrevocably ruining it. Nothing could be done to restore the soiled and spotted breadths, since, from Richmond, French cleaners were absent. A minor tragedy, but one that sank deep in my soul!

Hope springs eternal, and for the next evening reception at Mr. Stanard’s, where one was sure to meet the cream of society and all distinguished visitors to the capital, we fell upon a new device. Two venerable dresses in the family repertory, a fawn and a brown silk, were ripped, pressed, laid upon patterns of the latest date, per underground, and trimmed with double-pinked quillings of the same materials, dispersed ingeniously in curley-cues upon the skirt and “postilion bodice.” We had invented, pinked, ruffled, and sewed ourselves into a state of exhaustion, when at ten o’clock at night the last stitch was set, and I soon stood arrayed in what at casual glance seemed a brand-new modish toilette. My way into Mrs. Stanard’s drawing-rooms was made glad by hearing other girls whisper that I had got another new dress by blockade. But I took care, during the evening, to sit in sequestered spots, not daring to stand anywhere near the central chandeliers.

Early next morning came Mrs. Coulter Cabell’s maid, carrying a neat little oilskin covered basket and a note from her mistress - renowned for her elegance in dress

Page 148 - to ask if I would mind letting her take the pattern of my charming “postilion,” which should be returned in half an hour. Alas! poor me! Full well I knew that in daylight all the pressed places, pieced places, washed and ironed quillings, the age and expedients of that presumptuous garment would stand revealed! But I bravely lent it, and the poor dear fraud came back within the stipulated time!

I went to Cary Street to make a visit to Mrs. Chestnut, in whom Hetty and I delighted. Although she might well have been my mother, I never felt the difference in age, so gay and sprightly was she as a comrade, leading all the fun and nonsense in our talk. I found her with the Preston girls and others, lamenting that she hadn’t a bonnet of any kind to wear in full dress. The few milliners of the town were asking $500 for hats made of the homeliest materials from “other side” patterns. She had heard of my knack at millinery. Wouldn’t I advise her and earn her undying gratitude? So we all went into dear, laughing Mrs. Chestnut’s chamber, where the bed was soon strewn with wrecks and relics of her Washington finery. I selected and another girl ripped up an old velvet bodice, mignonette green in hue, a point lace barbe, and some sprays of artificial nasturtiums, pale yellow and old gold, and set to work to shape over an old bonnet frame. It was a rainy day; Mrs. Chestnut begged me to stay for luncheon, and, amid a feu de joie of fun and droll sayings from those clever women, I worked on till, whatever may be thought by scornful latter-day maidens, a very stylish and becoming head-piece was evolved.

Mrs. Chestnut declared she wore it with pride to every function of state or fashion afterward. If I had possessed the mercantile spirit of some London great

Page 149 ladies of to-day, I might, after that initial success, have set up a millinery on my own account; but the epoch of commercialism in society had yet to come.

Just as I had put the finishing touch on my work, Colonel Chestnut came in, saying he must be off at once with the President to inspect fortifications, as the enemy were within a few miles of Richmond. A tremendous roar of cannon began and continued at intervals all the afternoon. I helped Mrs. Chestnut to solace her warrior with sandwiches for the fray, and we saw him off on horseback, returning to every-day matters quite calmly, so used had we become to such happenings. Burton Harrison told me that in these rides of inspection, his chief, mounted on the white Arab stallion, always led the staff as close to the ragged edge of danger as was humanly possible, having an apparent longing to escape from official thraldom and return to the risks of his days of soldiering. But for all that, Mr. Davis would not allow his private secretary, whom he treated in every respect as a son, to indulge in his own ardent wish to resign his position with the Executive and enlist in the army. Twice during the four years of war, Mr. Harrison (styled colonel by the President, as a member of his personal staff) offered his resignation, and was asked to withdraw it in deference to the wishes of his chief, who used these words: “I can get many men to serve me in the field, but no one who will take your place.”

It was assuredly an interesting post held by the young graduate of Yale, so unexpectedly summoned to the innermost councils of the Confederate President. Before him daily deployed the chief actors of the Southern side of the mightiest struggle of modern warfare; under his hands passed the most secret reports and instructions, going to and from statesmen and military leaders;

Page 150 he lived, literally, in the heart of a thrilling crisis. During the whole period of the war and in the trying times thereafter, his tact, vivid intelligence, and high courtesy enabled him to preserve cordial relations with all those associated in his life, friends and foes alike; and this, I think, there will be no one to gainsay.

To return to my chronicle of Richmond gayeties. Now was instituted the “Starvation Club,” of which, as one of the original founders, I can speak with authority. It was agreed between a number of young women that a place for our soldier visitors to meet with us for dancing and chat, once a week, would be a desirable variation upon evening calls in private homes. The hostesses who successively offered their drawing-rooms were among the leaders in society. It was also decided that we should permit no one to infringe the rule of suppressing all refreshment, save the amber-hued water from the classic James. We began by having piano music for the dances, but the male members of the club made up between them a subscription providing a small but good orchestra. Before our first meeting, a committee of girls waited on General Lee to ask his sanction, with this result to the spokeswoman, who had ended with: “If you say no, general, we won’t dance a single step!” “Why, of course, my dear child. My boys need to be heartened up when they get their furloughs. Go on, look your prettiest, and be just as nice to them as ever you can be!”

We even had cotillons, to which everybody contributed favors. The gatherings were the jolliest imaginable. We had constant demands to admit new members, and all foreigners and general officers who visited Richmond were presented to our club, as a means of viewing the best society of the South.

Page 151

In summoning “spirits from the vasty deep” to record upon these pages, I had occasion to address a question or two, in writing, to a friend of yore, a Virginian who has identified himself with the best intellectual achievement in his State, since the sword he bore through all the battles delivered by the Army of Northern Virginia was laid aside to gather the rust of peaceful years. If it be a crime to quote a passage from the letter he sent me in return, I cry “Peccavi,” swearing that I will never reveal his name. No one else living, perhaps, could have written it, and its insertion here is my best excuse.

“Lord! Lord! What a dazzling, wholesome highbred little society it was! Night after night, I galloped into town to attend dances, charades, what not? and did not get back to my camp until two - three - what matter the hour? - but was always up, fresh as paint, when the reveillי bugles blew, and when, a little later on, my first sergeants reported to me as adjutant with their Battery Reports.

“To you and to me, looking back, it was such a blending of a real “Heroic Age” and a real “Golden Age” as could come but once in a million years. Everybody knew everybody (in the highest sense of that phrase), and there was youth, and beauty, and devotion, and splendid daring, a jealous honor and an antique patriotism, an utter self-abnegation and utter defiance of fate, a knightly chastity and beautiful surrender (of the coyest maid when her love was going to certain death). God! what a splendid high society that little handful was! Oh! I never talk of it now. People would only say, ‘Why there wasn’t one of them worth $100,000.’

“I wish I could tell you something, because, as Owen Meredith sings, ‘old ties, they cling, they cling.’ But

Page 152 I scarce remember anything of that brilliant winter except that I went everywhere, that ‘the Queen’ was most gracious to me, and that John S–, and C. de L–, and I were said to be the best ‘round dancers,’ as they were called then, in the world (think of that!); also that I was very much in love with Miss – (I was afraid to be in love with the Queen, because my dearest, dearest L– R– had said to me at the University of Virginia that he’d ‘offer up to instant death any caitiff who ever dared look at her’); and then with Miss –, and remotely with Miss –. It’s all very vague, but I have an uneasy remembrance that I was engaged to all of them, and that when the bugles sounded in the early spring, I went to the front with a hang-dog but a joyful heart!”

Wonderful were the toilettes concocted that festal winter. Maternal party dresses that had done duty at Newport, Saratoga, Sharon, the White Sulphur Springs, and in Washington and New Orleans ballrooms, were already worn to rags. One of them would be made to supply the deficiencies of the other until both passed into thin air. The oft-told stories of damask curtains taken down to fabricate into court trains over petticoats of window curtain lace, and of mosquito nettings made up over pink or blue cambric slips, now took shape. Certain it is that girls never looked prettier or danced with more perfect grace than those shut-in war maidens, trying to obey the great general’s behest and look their prettiest for the gallant survivors of his legions.

If one were to trust the melancholy old faded vignette photographs and cartes-de-visite of the sixties, any statement as to the beauty of the women might be taken with polite acquiescence but interior doubt. Before writing my memories, I have looked over dozens of these

Page 153 waifs of a long gone era, and in hardly one do I see more than a faint suggestion of the beauty of the original. To read descriptions brimming over with laudatory adjectives, and then turn to the portrait of the subject, brings in most cases a downfall of enthusiasm. It is always with a sigh of regret that I turn away from the illustrations of the belles of the Confederacy embalmed in the agreeable and sprightly volumes of recollections published of late years.

Of the women who were most in evidence in the Confederate capital, I have already spoken of Mrs. Davis and her sister and adoptive daughter, Margaret Howell. The ladies of General Lee’s family lived in a pleasant house in lower Franklin Street, then and afterward held as a shrine in the eyes of patriotic pilgrims. Mrs. Robert E. Lee, not strong in health and always a reserved woman in society, rarely showed herself in general gatherings. Miss Mary Custis Lee, who has for years been known to the exclusive circles of foreign capitals, having spent most of her latter life abroad, took the post of receiving and entertaining the friends and admirers who thronged around their doors. The death of a beloved daughter during the war, followed by that of Mrs. Fitzhugh Lee and her children, while her husband was in prison in the North, placed the family in mourning, disqualifying them for conspicuous appearance in society. Also, it was understood that Mrs. Lee felt a sense of impropriety in the suggestion that the wife and daughters of the commanding general of half-starved armies, himself sleeping always in a tent and living on ascetic fare, should take the lead in any entertainments of a social sort; so the old elegant hospitality of Arlington House, which had opened its doors to so many in the past, was allowed to pass

Page 154 away, to be renewed, however, at their future home in Lexington.

Mrs. Joseph E. Johnston, coming of the distinguished McLane family of Baltimore, had a little court of her own, in later days rather antagonistic to the ruling power of the Confederate White House, it was said.

Two daughters of Judge John Archibald Campbell, late of the Supreme Court of Washington - Mrs. Lay, and Miss Mary Ellen Campbell who married Arthur Pendleton Mason, of Colross, Alexandria - were an important element in the social side of Richmond life. To no one memory of those days do I turn now, with kindlier feeling, than to that of handsome and original Mary Ellen Campbell, who was one of my chosen friends.

The family of General John S. Preston, of Columbia, South Carolina, who had left a beautiful rose-embowered home to share the weal or woe of the Confederacy, was installed in a small undistinguished house in Franklin Street. It consisted of the handsome aristocratic parents, two sons in the army, and three daughters, like goddesses upon a heaven-kissing hill, tall and stately, with brilliant fresh complexions, altogether the embodiment of vigorous health.

I met two of this beautiful trio in Paris after the war, where they occupied, with their parents, a residence in the Rue Lord Byron, receiving and received by the best of French society, with the same grace they brought to our happy-go-lucky refugee existence in Richmond.

Our good neighbors at Vaucluse, the Samuel Coopers, had removed to Richmond, where the general, albeit of Northern birth, had elected to serve the South. Made adjutant-general of the Confederate Government, he was much esteemed by his confrטres and the public.

Page 155 His wife, born as the nineteenth century came in, lived for many years after the war at “Cameron,” her home in Fairfax, with her son and daughter, a picture of old-time dignity and high breeding in her late eventide of life. Their daughter, afterward Mrs. Dawson, fair and thoroughbred, with a charming frankness of speech and manner, was one of my coadjutors in the founding of the Starvation Club, and with the joyous hours of my Confederate experience her image blends pleasingly.

Commodore Sydney Smith Lee, son of “Light Horse Harry” and brother of General Lee, had married a sister of Mrs. Cooper. No one can forget the illumining brightness and cheery sympathy of Mrs. S. S. Lee, who had given all her stalwart sons to the Southern service, from “General Fitz,” always in the forefront of danger, to handsome “Midshipman Dan,” my brother’s messmate and pal in many a bit of risky naval service, now a settled but by no means subdued paterfamilias, living on his own acres near Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Mrs. Chestnut, known to the world through the posthumous publication of letters revealing her strength, sweetness, and vivacity of mind, was a fixed star in the refugee circle of Richmond. The delightful Harrisons, of Brandon, gave over their historic home upon the James to the shelling of General Butler’s gunboats and subsequent occupation by bats and birds and squirrels, and came to live in Linden Row. Mrs. George Harrison, formerly the beautiful Gulielma Gordon, of Savannah, had just come to them as a bride. Mrs. Myers, daughter of General Twiggs, of New Orleans, and youthful wife of General A. S. Myers, quartermaster-general of the Confederacy, bewitched men and women alike. When, just after the war, my mother and I took up our abode at the Ville au Bois, a villa of apartments at

Page 156 Neuilly, General and Mrs. Myers and their little daughter came to live there also, and made a large part of the pleasure of our Parisian days. Mrs. Clement Clay, of Alabama, was ever foremost in providing things clever and original for the diversion of her friends. Mrs. Alfred Barbour, wife of General Johnston’s chief quartermaster, with her sister, Miss Frances Daniel, later, wife of my cousin John Brune Cary, of Baltimore, were among the blooming young beauties of the day. Pretty Miss Lizzie Peyton Giles, came through the lines from St. Louis, reputedly to marry a Confederate general, bearing with her sheaves in the shape of a trousseau of smart and admirably fitting gowns. To our disappointment, the promised wedding was declared “off,” but since we kept the bride and she kept her finery to delight us, no great harm was done to our feelings. Colonel and Mrs. Eugene McLean, she ever bright and sparkling, were much in evidence. My room-mate of the Lefebvre school-days, pretty and outspoken Evelyn Cabell, who sang like a bird, had already married young Russell Robinson, of Richmond, and was disproving the statement that a Southern matron, however few of years, cannot hope to retain the belleship of her former estate. And apropos of this assertion, it was said that the elegant Captain John Moncure Robinson, of Philadelphia, recently arrived from European travel and possessing a wide range of social experience, had announced that his real mission in benighted Richmond was to introduce the German cotillon and bring out the young married women. What Captain Robinson actually did was to marry Miss Champe Conway, one of the prettiest of the more youthful set!

It is hard to write of the living save in stilted and self-conscious phrase; but who could depict the days of

Page 157 war in Richmond, and omit those two cousins, Jennie Pegram (now Mrs. McIntosh, of Baltimore) and Mattie Paul, whose marriage to Captain William Myers was one of the interesting occurrences of that time! So blended are they both in my memory with the long procession of friends who have passed over the river and rest under the shade of ever-living trees, that I know not whether to mention them in sad or joyous words. But even under the stress of that terrible hand of steel that for four years held us down, we had many bright hours together.

Most of the people I have cited were in our own class of refugees. Of the resident families, many of them abiding in the wide old ample houses, set back from the street in gardens of redundant bloom and foliage, with magnolia trees guarding the portals, that we would pass in our walks envying their suggestion of home delights, the list is longer. Not only do their names represent, to any student of Americana, the direct outgrowth of the best Colonial stock, but it would have been hard to find a group of gentle-folk better equipped to conduct the functions of good society.

A very young person who had been reading with avidity some of the domestic war chronicles printed in latter days, asked me quite gravely if it were true that every man of that period was handsome, clever, and a paladin of bravery, and every woman a radiant belle and beauty. We all know how, as described in family letters and on tombstones, our grandmothers and great-aunts, our grandfathers and the uncles who died young, have seemed to our imagination to wear separate little haloes. It behoves me, therefore, to touch lightly upon the charms and virtues of those old-time citizens of Richmond, and to let adjectives of praise remain embalmed in the rosemary of individual recollection.

Page 158

The Macfarland house in Grace Street was running over with young and winsome women; including Miss Turner Macfarland, who married Colonel Wilcox Brown, with her cousins, the Bierne sisters and Mrs. Parkman, like tiny Dresden figurines, the latter early a war-widow, clad in deep sables, and rarely seen in public. Miss Bierne Turner, the fifth of that group of charmers, married Colonel John S. Saunders, of Baltimore, where they lived for many years. Miss Betty Bierne became the wife of the Hon. Wm. Porcher Miles in the autumn of 1862, and Miss Susan Bierne married Captain Henry Robinson, of Georgetown.

With the hospitable dwelling of Mr. Barton Haxall in Grace Street, I had been made familiar through my friendship at Lefebvre’s school with Harriet Haxall, later Mrs. Henry A. Wise, Jr. Miss Lucy Haxall, the eldest daughter of the house, who married Captain Edward Lees Coffey, an Irish officer volunteering for Confederate service, later lived and died in New York, where her daughter Edwalyn met and married Mr. Charles de Kay, author and poet. Charlotte Haxall, the first wife of Captain Robert E. Lee, died early; Mrs. Wise, whose son, Barton Haxall Wise, wrote an excellent life of his grandfather, the fiery and virile ex-governor, later Brigadier-General Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, passed away in the prime of matronhood. Captain Philip Haxall married Mary Triplett, of Richmond, whom I last saw at an entertainment given for the first Mrs. William Whitney and myself at General Joseph Anderson’s in Richmond. When Mrs. Whitney, all enthusiasm over her glimpse of the South and its society, on our journey from Washington to Florida, beheld the famous Richmond beauty, she whispered to me: “Here is one that more than realizes what has been said of her!”

Page 159 Fair as the lilies of the valley bordering her corsage, dressed in a gown of white satin moulded to her beautiful form, with gleaming eyes and a wonderful pink flush on her cheeks, so I like to think of the Mary Haxall ere long to pass away in her sleep from heart trouble, leaving no child to endow with her heritage of beauty.

One of the younger set represented by Miss Triplett, whose name was oftenest heard bracketed with hers, was Miss Lizzie Cabell, now Mrs. Albert Ritchie, of Baltimore. Miss Mattie Ould, daughter of General Robert Ould, belonged to this group of girls who came on late in the war. Good-looking, well placed and connected, this young girl stands out on the background of the day as a spontaneous wit and suave talker on any subject, one of those who, like Mlle. Julie de Lespinasse in the salons of old France, would have found her special chronicler. But the sayings and repartees left behind at Mattie Ould’s death seem to me spoiled by handling, and such as I have seen in print really give no idea of the girl’s inimitable drollery and continual play of wit. The home of Dr. Charles Bell Gibson on Grace Street was a haunt of clever and responsive people, welcomed and inspired by Mrs. Gibson and her daughter Mary, to whose credit were circulated many bon mots and amusing strictures on things current.

I think we all fancied that Mrs. Robert Stanard came nearer to realizing the French ideal of a salon than any other hostess in Richmond. She was a widow, reputed wealthy and of considerable personal distinction, handsome, darkeyed, and wondrously persuasive with the other sex, who came when she called and left promptly when she gave token of a change of mood. After the war Mrs. Stanard was heard of in various

Page 160 places abroad, always received with the cordiality befitting her recognized position as a leader in her own home. We knew her in New York after she became Mrs. Robb, and to the last she maintained the gracefully imperious manner of the admitted sovereign - a “she-who-must-be-obeyed” to all around her.

At Mrs. Stanard’s one saw much of Mr. Pierre Soulי, of New Orleans, dark, suave, courtier-like, diplomatic in little things and big ones. Mr. Benjamin brought there his charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books. The Vice-President, Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, rarely seen in other houses - spare, worn, pungent - dropped in upon her sometimes; our brilliant friend Mr. L. Q. C. Lamar lent the witchery of his presence; all the foreigners in town made speed to attend her evenings; statesmen and soldiers, old and young, came into the circle of her magnetism. Needless to add, the women of Richmond were not slow in availing themselves of her none too profuse invitations.

Mrs. Pegram’s house in Linden Row was another centre for pleasant gatherings. Her daughter, Miss Mary Pegram, and her younger daughter Jennie, aided this gentle lady in doing the honors of a home which was also to give to the Confederacy two of the fixed stars in its military firmament. General John Pegram, a West Point graduate, who fell at Hatcher’s Run, near Petersburg, commanding Early’s old division, on February 6, 1865, in almost the last battle of the war, was a noble and lovable fellow, and a fine officer. His marriage with my cousin, Hetty Cary, three weeks before his death, elsewhere told, was one of the tragedies of the time, unforgettable by those who shared in it. His brother, William Pegram, going into service aged

Page 161 nineteen, at the outbreak of hostilities, and quickly attaining rank and reputation as an officer of the Purcell Battery, with which he took part in every general action fought by the Army of Northern Virginia from the first battle of Manassas to the surrender at Appomattox Court House, won brilliant fame as a soldier. Colonel Pegram came to his lamented death at the battle of Five Forks, while seated upon his charger cheering his men to victory. The loss of these two valiant brothers, who sleep side by side in Hollywood, was keenly felt by Richmond, where their memory is still treasured as a heritage to succeeding generations of her citizens.

Of other hospitable homes overshadowed by the sacrifice of their best beloved in war, one was that of Colonel George Munford, secretary of the commonwealth, whose beautiful young son, Ellis, killed at Malvern Hill, was brought home in the dusk of evening, lying across his own caisson, and delivered to his family sitting all unconscious of their loss, upon the steps of their dwelling, seeking the cooler temperature that falls after dark in a Southern summer.

Another home made desolate was that of Lieutenant-Colonel Bradfute Warwick, brought there to die of wounds received in the battle of Gaines’s Mill, aged barely twenty-three, but with an experience in military service as full and brilliant as his life was brief. Bradfute Warwick, the son of a wealthy father, had just completed a journey in Europe and the East, when his daring spirit was attracted to volunteer with Garibaldi, in whose stirring campaign in Sicily he won high honors. Upon the outbreak of war between the States, he hurried back to give his sword to Virginia, and was assigned to his first service in the western part of the State.

Page 162 In October, 1861, he received his appointment from President Davis as major of the Fourth Texas Regiment, upon the promotion of whose colonel, Hood, to be brigadier-general, Warwick became lieutenant-colonel. At the battle near Barhamsville, called Elkton’s Landing, he was conspicuous for gallant bearing and the resistless fury of his attack. During the battle of Gaines’s Mill, at a moment when the tide seemed to have turned against Confederate arms, three brigades having been broken to pieces in the attempt to storm the enemy’s works, General Hood gave his old regiment preference to lead in a final desperate assault. The fall of Marshall, their colonel, just before the command to charge was heard, gave young Warwick the leadership of this band of splendid soldiers. His fierce and intrepid dash upon the enemy’s breastworks, breaking both their lines, has been told as a tale to their children, by the two hundred and odd men who came alive out of the furious fire that had cut down as many more of their number. At the very moment of victory, when Colonel Warwick, seizing a battle-flag from its bearer, was about to plant it upon a captured battery, his right breast was pierced by a minie ball, and he fell mortally wounded.

One of my favorite comrades on many a ride near Richmond was young Preston Hampton, a model of manly beauty, son of the gallant leader of cavalry, General Wade Hampton, of South Carolina. A feeling of poignant sorrow came into our home circle with the sad story of Preston Hampton’s death while fighting beside his brother, Wade, as members of their father’s Legion. It was said that the general, seeing his youngest son plunge forward, far in advance of his line of battle, ordered Lieutenant Wade Hampton to “bring the boy back.” The older son obeying, reached his brother

Page 163 as Preston fell from his saddle dead, and as he caught the body, was himself shot through the shoulder. The general, spurring toward them himself, lifted the dead boy from the brother’s arms, kissed Preston’s face, and commending his other son to his comrades, rode on into the fight, not knowing till the day’s end whether Wade had lived or died.

Of other Carolinians in service in Virginia, whom we were accustomed to meet often, were the seven Haskell brothers, renowned for gallantry in action and courtesy in the society of women; and Colonel, afterwards General, Moxley Sorrel, slender, highbred, and handsome, whose recent “Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer,” finished shortly before his death, narrates better than can I, the story of his valorous career.

I never saw Miss Antoinette Polk until long after she had been the Baronne de la Charette, wife of the gallant and illustrious General Baron de Charette, leader of the Pope’s zouaves, said to be to-day the most honored and beloved soldier of the old rיgime in France. I had the pleasure to be their guest at their chateau, La Basse Motte, near St. Malo, in Brittany, a few years since. She was one of the heroines of the sixties with whose beauty and romantic daring the Southern country rang. It was the general himself who told me, in rapid and dramatic French, this story of his wife’s youth, while we were standing in the chapel of his chateau, hung with memorials and tattered banners of his own stirring war life. She was a superb horsewoman, and one day she and a girl cousin rode six miles into Columbia, Tennessee, to find the town occupied by Union cavalry. Ashwood Hall, her father’s home, was at the moment filled with young Confederate officers, all unconscious of the enemy’s vicinity. Miss Polk, grasping the situation

Page 164 at a glance, decided to warn her friends. She and her cousin, turning their horses, started at a run for home, chased by a squad of United States soldiers, suspecting mischief. The tradition of this wild ride by two girls, “over brake and brier,” till, as their horses began to show fatigue, they suddenly wheeled and jumped fences their pursuers dared not attempt, reaching Ashwood in time to save their kinsmen from capture and imprisonment, has been handed down wherever Baronne de Charette has carried her charming presence; and it is always added how beautiful she looked on arrival at her home, breathless and nearly spent, her hat and whip gone, her blonde hair falling all over her like a mantle.

No picture of Richmond in war days would be histoire vיridique omitting the household of the Hon. Randolph Tucker, attorney-general of Virginia, the echo of whose fame as a wit, story-teller of rare skill, and a brilliant jurist, still echoes down the corridor of time in Washington as in Richmond. When I went from New York to Washington to visit the William C. Whitneys in H Street, while he was Secretary of the Navy, my host said to me: “I am getting together a dinner of the cleverest men and best fellows of my acquaintance, at which I wish you and my wife to be present, and whatever else is left out of it, there are two indispensables: Ran Tucker and an old Smithfield ham!” Mr. Tucker came to this dinner and, as a treat to me, was placed upon my right. Brilliantly did he justify his reputation in making the social wheels go round. One continued laugh accompanied the menu at our end of the table, but, as usual with table-talk, it was as hard to gather up as split globules of quicksilver. I remember we asked him if it were true they

Page 165 served coffee in large breakfast cups during the White House dinners in Mrs. Hayes’s rיgime; and whether he had given to a course of Roman punch, frappי with brandy unknown to the good hostess and served in little boats of crystal, the name of “Life-Saving Station”; but this he was too discreet a diplomatist to admit.

My uncle, Dr. Fairfax, of Alexandria, had taken up his abode in Grace Street, in a small house, poor in contrast with the broad generous one in Cameron Street, Alexandria, forsaken through patriotic motives. Here his oldest daughter, Monimia, was married to the Hon. George Davis, of Wilmington, North Carolina, attorney-general in Mr. Jefferson Davis’s cabinet, a man of high character and mind, distinguished as a public servant in the broadest sense, to whose memory his city has recently erected a substantial monument. My cousin removed later to live a happy life in Wilmington, where her two daughters survive her.

Page 166 CHAPTER VIII

NOW came the winter’s lull before the new fury of the storm should break forth with the spring. It was evident to all older and graver people that the iron belt surrounding the Southern country was being gradually drawn closer and her vitality in mortal peril of exhaustion. Our armies were dwindling, those of the North increasing with every draft and the payment of liberal bounties. Starved, nearly bankrupt, thousands of our best soldiers killed in battle, their places filled by boys and old men, the Federal Government refusing to exchange prisoners; our exports useless because of armed ships closing in our ports all along the coast, our prospects were of the gloomiest, even though Lee had won victory for our banners in the East. We young ones, who knew nothing and refused to believe in “croakers,” kept on with our valiant boasting about our invincible army and the like; but the end was beginning to be in sight.

Christmas in the Confederacy offered as a rule little suggestion of the festival known to plum-pudding and robin-red-breast stories in annuals. Every crumb of food better than the ordinary, every orange, apple, or banana, every drop of wine and cordial procurable, went straightway to the hospitals, public or private. Many of the residents had set aside at least one room of their stately old houses as a hospital, maintaining at their own expense as many sick or wounded soldiers as they could accommodate. On Christmas eve, all the

Page 167 girls and women turned out in the streets, carrying baskets with sprigs of holly, luckily plentiful, since the woods around Richmond still held its ruddy glow in spots where bullets had not despoiled the trees beyond recall.

Our little household had been gladdened by the return of our midshipman from Charleston, where he had been again on duty, and his re-establishment on board the “Old Pat,” as their school-ship was called by the youngsters. Just here opened a delightful vision. We were all invited to spend Christmas at “The Retreat,” in King William County, the way being then open and without danger of interruption, save by overfull rivers. The postscript to this agreeable epistle was brief, but to the point: “Bring your own gentlemen!” After much merriment in deciding whom this would include, the matter settled down into finding out who could be got to go. Of the limited supply of men who could get off for the jaunt, our friends Lee Tucker, naval paymaster, Confederate States and Captain Joseph Denטgre, of the ordnance department, with my small brother, were happily found available, and in the gray dawn of a December morning we set off by train from Richmond. At the last minute it was discovered that Midshipman Cary had forgotten his passport, he and Mr. Tucker remaining behind to secure it, thus necessitating a walk next day of half the distance from the terminus of their railway journey, the rest of the way by a hired buggy.

At our stopping-place, reached about 9 A.M. after a cold and joggling run by train, finding Uncle Nebuchadnezzar, a Retreat darky, in waiting in a covered wagon lined with straw, we inquired of him the distance to the house.

Page 168

“Well, mistis,” he answered beamingly, “it mout be ten miles and then agin, it mout be twenty; some says one! some says t’other! but it’s a right smart little bit; mebbe it’s more, mebbe it’s less, but sure as yer bawn, I disremembers.”

And “Sure as yer bawn, I disremembers,” was incorporated in our coterie-sprache from that moment. Whatever were the facts, evening found us still in the wagon, less buoyant than at the start. Our Confederate ideas of pleasuring were on a limited scale compared with those of to-day, when parties of young people must have motors, fur coats, foot-warmers, and thermos vacuum bottles to facilitate their winter jaunts. When, toward sunset, we finally turned in at the Retreat gate, amid the barking of dogs and the rush out-doors of our glad hosts and their children, attended by scarcely less welcoming negroes, all woes were forgotten. Two minutes later we were in enjoyment of intense physical relief, seated around a fire of generous logs sending out a glow that wrapped us in its warmth; and in half an hour we sat down to a table heaped with old-time luxuries: partridges, a sugar-cured ham, spare-ribs, and sausage - for those who knew what pork at the Retreat could be - corn-pone, biscuits, fresh, delicious butter, pitchers of mantling cream, and coffee, hot, rich, fragrant, tasting of the bean! We had literally no words!

Dear, cheery little “Cousin Nannie,” our hostess, despairing because Nebuchadnezzar had taken the wrong ford, thereby causing our delay and suffering, did not stop lamenting over us till we had eaten a disgraceful amount of supper. As soon as possible, she insisted that we girls should go to our rooms, and there, sinking into lavender-scented, linen-spread feather-beds, with a fire dancing itself out upon the hearth, and a smiling

Page 169 negro woman waiting to extinguish the candles, elysium was attained. Was it true - could such home comforts still be for us war-worn children of the Confederacy? The last sounds in my waking ears were the patter of childish feet upon the landing, and a merry little golden-haired elf putting her head in at the door to cry, “I’ll catch you, Christmas gift!” Then the strong, delicious aroma of forest greens from the hall below was wafted in as some one in authority captured the tiny invader and bore her off - and so - oblivion!

Next day, a quiet, cosey morning on a sofa wheeled up before the fire, with winter sunbeams glancing through crimson curtains into a room bowered in Christmas garlands. At mid-day a ramble through a forest heavy with pine odors, where a carpet of brown needles and dry twigs crackled musically under foot, amid currents of warm perfumed air; across denuded fields, where morning rime still glittered in fence corners upon the skeletons of last summer’s wild flowers, and in the wide blue sky overhead crows wheeled and cawed - peace everywhere, peace infinite, no evil sight or sound to break the spell; and best of all, on our return to the house to find our two lost sheep of yesterday arrived and safe in the fold! To have had our boy miss that dinner would have robbed it of all savor.

Such a dinner! Served at three o’clock P.M. (after a luncheon, at twelve, of cordials and cakes), the host at his end of the long table, dispensing an emperor among turkeys, “Cousin Nannie” at hers, engaged in carving another ham (that of the night before having already gone to its long rest among the house servants) - a ham befrilled with white paper, its pink slices cut thin as shavings, the fat having a nutty flavor - with cloves stuck into a crust of sugar. I remember a course of

Page 170 game, and then the plum-pudding, with a berg of vanilla ice-cream and a mould of calves’-foot jelly, together with many little iced cakes and rosy apples in pyramids. This for us who had been for months living on salt pork and rice, beans and dried apples, who were to live on that fare (and in short rations, too) until poor old Richmond fell! The deeds done with fork and spoon that day, are they not written in the annals of the Retreat?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Our holiday was over. Again packed in the wagon, this time with the warmth of kindly good-byes and the memory of a royal welcome forming a shield around our hearts against cold and all Pandora’s box of ills. “And just look here!” said Joe Denטgre as we started, designating a large split basket of luncheon hidden in the straw. “Then, don’t any of you say there’s such a word as trouble in this world!”

We creaked along. We sank into deep ruts and dragged through miry reaches. The drive seemed endless. The cork came out of our persimmon beer and it filled Lee Tucker’s shoe, but nobody complained. The victim, possessing a very nice voice of his own, started: “If you want to have a good time, jine the cavalry,” in which everybody chimed. Other songs followed, and catches: “Frטre Jacques!” “A southerly wind and a cloudy sky,” and “White sand and gray sand.” At two o’clock we had luncheon, and a happy silence fell.

More songs; then “Muggins” was proposed, a game of cards I thought detestable; but they played it as earnestly as people nowadays play bridge. Next, Mr. Tucker got out “Elsie Venner,” and gave us an example of his elocution in the tea-party of “Mrs. Marilla

Page 171 Rowens,” and so we arrived at a ford that of course we couldn’t cross.

To crown all, it was raining. Captains Denטgre and Tucker went off in the gathering darkness through mud ankle-deep, reappearing with news of a house somewhere into which we might be taken. Whatever failed us in those days, it was not Virginian hospitality! The good people whose home we invaded seemed more than pleased to receive us, and next morning betimes started us again “On to Richmond.” By that time all Christmas cheer had gone out of us. To reach a ferry, where there was only a tiny makeshift of a skiff, we and the mules wearily took up the burden of life again, plodding five miles through sloughs of hopeless mud, up perpendicular hills and down again, till every bone ached and philosophy ceased to be a virtue.

Once more on the shores of classic Pamunkey, liquid mud flowing everywhere, in prospect a crossing, two by two, in a miserable egg-shell made of slimy planks, the bottom quite under water! The crowning feat of our expedition was, on reaching the other shore, all vehicles failing, to take heart of grace and walk six miles, in a downpour, to the nearest station of the railway. Old Uncle Nebuchadnezzar, an ebon shade, smiling broadly over his coat-pocket full of Confederate bluebacks administered as tips, remaining with his mules on the far bank of the Stygian River, alone told the tale of our perfect holiday. If it is asked what were our notions of perfection, I would answer that in those days we were sustained by what Cervantes styled “the bounding of the soul, the bursting of laughter, and the quicksilver of the five senses.”

As all chronicles of our wartime must of necessity drop often into melancholy detail, I am trying to

Page 172 assemble some of the more cheerful aspects of Richmond life. One day in January, Mrs. George Wythe Randolph, the beautiful Oriental-looking wife of our cousin, the Secretary of War, appealed to me to arrange for her an entertainment for an evening party which it devolved upon her to give to social and official Richmond. So I “thought up” a series of charades in pantomime, called in the players I could depend upon, and with the aid of Vizitelly, who not only painted a reversible drop scene but the faces of all the actors, the affair came off successfully.

The ready muse of Mr. Thompson bubbled over in a set of verses, read with spirit between each word, by Miss Mary Preston in the costume of a Greek chorus. I have them now, in the author’s beautiful distinct caligraphy. “Knighthood,” was the first word, and when the stanza I shall quote was read, the allusion it contained to General Hood, sitting well to the front in our audience, was a complete surprise. The object of the eulogy, looking like the hero of a Wagner opera, was compelled by a tumult of hand-clappings to arise and bow, blushing to the roots of his hair, and it was several minutes before the performance could go on.

“Knight is my first, my second is a name

That’s doubly linked unto enduring fame;

The gentle poet of the Bridge of Sighs,

The hero, cynosure of tenderest eyes.

HOOD, whose keen sword has never known a stain,

Whose valor brightened Chickamauga’s plain;

Well might he stand in glory’s blazing roll

To represent to future times my whole;

For goodlier Knighthood surely never shone

Round fair Queen Bess upon her stately throne

Than his, whose lofty deeds we proudly call our own.”

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General Hood, who had recently lost a leg in battle, was generally supposed to be engaged to marry the fair and regal being near whom he sat at our entertainment. His staff-surgeon going abroad through the blockade about this time was reported to carry, as his chief’s direction for purchase in Paris, this order: “Mem: Three cork legs, and a diamond ring.”

The love affair attributed to him did not materialize. It was some time after the war, when General Hood, married to a beautiful girl in New Orleans, and possessed of an unusually liberal allowance of young children, was said, upon his travels over the Southern country, where he had once wired orders deploying conquering armies, to telegraph ahead for fresh milk at the ensuing station.

From a stray leaf of my working copy of the programme, I find our dramatis personז in “Pen” were Miss Josephine Chestney, as a quaint and pretty “Fanny Squeers,” cajoling Major Ward, as “Nicholas Nickleby,” to sharpen her quill pen.

In “Eye,” Miss Herndon, as the “Widow Wadman,” displayed her ailing orb to Mr. Forbes, as “Uncle Toby.”

In “Tent” we had one of those Eastern scenes dear to amateurs, with all the jewels, spangles, and scarfs of friends and family united on the persons of young ladies who loll upon sofa cushions. In this word, Mrs. Russell Robinson was a lovely “Light of the Harem.” The only real harem I ever penetrated in my journeys in Eastern countries was utterly unlike our representation, but we were all quite satisfied.

The word “Penitent” was posed by Miss Lizzie Giles in the garb of a novice with what seemed real tears upon her roseate cheeks.

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Our next was time-honored “Matrimony.” In “Mat,” Mr. Robert Dobbin lost his lady-love by too great anxiety in looking for a mat to kneel upon before Miss Pollard.

“Rye” revealed Vizitelly’s painted fields as a background for my Cousin Hetty Cary’s appearance in the guise of a Scotch lassie far too good-looking to be true, a picture several times redemanded while the piano industriously repeated “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.” After this scene my cousin was about to go around to sit among the audience, when her presence became necessary to quell an incipient strike among my supers behind the scenes. These volunteers being none other than Generals J. E. B. Stuart and Fitz Lee, the former declared he wouldn’t stay by himself in that stuffy place next the butler’s pantry and hold up a step-ladder unless Miss Hetty Cary would come and talk to him.

The result of this arrangement was that as the curtain was about to rise upon “Money” - where I, as a rustic maiden, was to divide my smiles between Colonel John Saunders, an humble swain of my own estate, and Vizitelly, a plumed cavalier with a purse of gold to offer - a fiasco occurred that nearly wrecked me and the syllable. My scene, charmingly painted as an English thatched cottage wreathed in roses, with a glimpse of the Thames in the background, had a garden fence, on the stile of which I was supposed to be perched coquettishly. Just as I had seated myself upon the stile, held up by General Stuart in the rear, and Vizitelly was prepared to make his swaggering entrance from the side, while Colonel Saunders began enacting whole volumes of jealousy, my perch gave way and I slid to the ground. Instantly the heroine was transformed into an irate stage-manager darting behind the scenes to scold

Page 175 an offending super. In vain General Stuart protested abject penitence for having forgotten for a moment and let go, and promised better behavior. Accused of gross neglect while on duty, he was sentenced to lose his position and sit among the audience for the remainder of the show. General Fitz Lee, virtuously declaring that no young lady could make him forget his responsibility as a step-ladder, took and held General Stuart’s post.

Poor Stuart - gallant and joyous Stuart! Lee’s right arm - the meteor cavalryman whose men gloried in following him to the death! In a few short months after this brief dalliance with fun in Richmond, he was to ride his last ride, and be shot down by a bullet from the outpost after the battle of the Yellow Tavern. In all our parties and pleasurings, there seemed to lurk a foreshadowing of tragedy, as in the Greek plays where the gloomy end is ever kept in sight.

For those of this generation less familiar than were we with Stuart’s fame, I quote a striking description from a book called the “Crisis of the Confederacy,” written by an English officer, Captain Cecil Battine, of the Fifteenth King’s Hussars. “James Stuart, or Jeb, as he was called in the army, from his first initials, proved himself in his short career the greatest warrior amongst the great men who have been so called. Whether or not he was really descended from Robert the Bruce, he certainly inherited the kingly talent for leading men and making war. He won the great battle of May 3, which was decisive in this campaign, by skillful and gallant leading. He was but twenty-eight years old when he took Jackson’s place at the head of the Second Corps.” And again, in describing Chancellorsville: “The signal was then given for an assault right along the line. While

Page 176 the guns swept the road and the clearing on either side of it, Stuart led his infantry once more across the ravine, singing at the top of his voice, and waving his sword. His blonde beard, blue eyes and noble figure on horseback recalled the Norman hero who led the van at Hastings, singing the songs of Roland.”

The finale of our performance at General Randolph’s (given before the President, the cabinet, and as many more official people as the spacious rooms could hold) was very satisfying to our pride, although that is a condition rarely missing from the efforts of amateur actors. The whole word “Matrimony” was embodied in the quarrel scene from the “School for Scandal,” beginning with the peevish protest of “Sir Peter”: “Lady Teazle, Lady Teazle, I’ll not bear it,” in which the protean Mr. Lee Tucker and the writer of these lines took the parts of the ill-matched pair. My costume that night was like a New England minister’s donation party, a combination of unrelated parts contributed by friends. Miss Maria Freeland, our neighbor, had at the last moment sent over the white ostrich plumes, sought wildly among my friends without success, that crowned the superstructure of my powdered locks, and I wore dear knows who’s pearl necklace, in mortal fear of losing it. Everybody borrowed; everybody lent; we had not the least reserve in seeking.

That winter, also, was given the amateur performance of which several accounts have recently gone into print. Mrs. Clement Clay, as “Mrs. Malaprop,” was astonishingly good, dominating our little stage with the ease of a veteran actress. Mr. John Randolph as “Sir Anthony,” Paymaster L. M. Tucker as “Jack Absolute,” Major R. W. Brown as “Sir Lucius,” Major

Page 177 Frank Ward as “Bob Acres,” Mr. George Robinson as “David,” and Mr. R. Dobbin as “Coachman,” with my little brother as “Fag,” carried off their parts with a dash that made me often long in the after days, when I conducted so many amateur theatricals for charity in New York, for such admirable material with which to cast my plays. The drollest incident was when General Hood, new to “The Rivals,” said about “Bob Acres”: “By Jove, I believe the man’s afraid!”

The witty, rattling old comedy went from beginning to end without a lagging moment. I had the uninspiring part of “Lydia Languish,” serving as a foil for the real brilliancy of Mrs. Clay’s performance. We played it two nights successfully before large audiences of our friends. I find in a scrap of old diary, without a date, this entry: “My first dress was white muslin, lace negligי cap, blue ribbons; second dress, petticoat and bodice of pale blue brocade (once worn by somebody else at a White House levee), train of pale pink moirי antique, powdered hair, wreath of pink roses, fichu of old Mechlin lace…. “Clarence had an especial permit from the Secretary of the Navy (Mr. Mallory) to leave the school-ship for these occasions. Mamma patched up his livery with much skill, and at the first performance, had the pride of hearing an old general, doubled with laughter on the seat next to her, say: “By George, that Fag beats all the rest of ‘em! It’s the best bit of acting I ever saw….”

Tired as we were, next morning I went with Hetty, General Fitz Lee, and Colonel von Borcke for a long ride in brilliant winter sunshine, our hearts bounding with our horses. Hetty looked so beautiful in her habit none of us could keep our eyes off her. (The only girl I ever thought compared with her in the saddle was Sally

Page 178 Preston, whose habit, made in England, fitted her noble figure like a glove. She rode in London park style, and when mounted on her fine bay, Fairfax, was a glowing picture of vigorous beauty.) I made them laugh by telling “behind the scenes” anecdotes, and complaining of the black and blue spot left on my shoulder by Mrs. Malaprop’s real pinch. I also confided to them that I should love to go upon the real stage, but knew, if I did, all the grandfathers and great-aunts would rise from their graves in horror! It was not so long before that a member of the Episcopal Church in Virginia was forbidden to go to the theatre, and to races, or threatened with excommunication for waltzing. This was during the period when the spirit of valiant old Bishop Meade still controlled our Church, in reaction from the days of the card-playing, fox-hunting clergy and resident chaplains who read the service in surplices worn over pink coats, keeping their hunters saddled and tethered at the vestry door!

I am trying to remember, to write down here, some of the men we were accustomed to meet at our parties and to receive in our drawing-rooms. Of the general officers, first and last, the list is a long one, besides those already mentioned in these pages. General Custis Lee; General W. H. F. Lee; Generals Elzey, Gracie, Roger A. Pryor, Lawton, Albert Sydney Johnston (the noblest Roman of them all in appearance), Gordon, Morgan, Buckner, McCullough, Jenkins, Edward Johnston, P. M. B. Young, and splendid General Breckinridge. The Hon. Mr. Clingman was a devoted if rather melancholy squire of dames. Then there were Colonels John Taylor Wood, Lubbock, and Preston Johnston, of the President’s staff; Colonels George Deas and Bayne; Captain Basil Gildersleeve, of Ewell’s staff; Colonel

Page 179 Osmun Latrobe (who has not let himself belong to a by-gone age but still holds his own at New York, Newport, and Lenox, as in our little war-jammed Richmond); always popular Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, of whom we were to see so much in later days at Bar Harbor; Hon. William Porcher Miles; General Chestnut and Governor Manning; Captain Gordon McCabe (very young, but a hot fighter, a nimble dancer, and already a rare wit); Captain Joseph Bryan; Captain Frank Dawson (the clever, handsome, venturesome English lad, who, in order to cast his fortunes with the Confederacy, had come out from Southampton as a stowaway in the Nashville’s mad run described in my brother’s recital, and was to win fame and distinction in his adopted land); that picturesque old warrior and fire-eater, Colonel Frederick Skinner, of the First Virginia; Captain Page McCarty; Captain John Esten Cooke, the author; Dr. George Ross; Mr. Cooper de Leon, whom I had known since crepuscular days in Washington; Captain Samuel Shannon; Captain “Wragge” Ferguson; Captains Shirley Carter, Stuart Symington, and James Fraser; Major Theodore Chestney; Major Thomas Brander; Colonel William Munford; young Captain John Sargeant Wise; Captain Travers Daniel; the brilliant and many-sided Innis Randolph; Captain Legh Page; Majors Caskie Cabell and Willie Caskie; and my brother’s friends, Midshipmen Jefferson Davis Howell and handsome James Morris Morgan, the latter early betrothed to the youthful daughter of Secretary Trenholm.

A friend and guest of our Vaucluse days was Captain William Washington, the artist of “The Burial of Latane,” a touching war picture, and others, some of which still hang upon the walls of old Confederate sympathizers, more, perhaps, “In Memoriam,” than because

Page 180 of very great intrinsic merit. Washington was a capital fellow, clever, well-bred, and versatile, and deserved more fame and fortune than he had won when we saw him later, buffeting the fierce current of New York following the war.

Mr. Edward Valentine I met first when I was a schoolgirl at Lefebvre’s and he a mere lad trying short flights with his budding wings of genius into the empyrean of success he has since attained as a sculptor. To him the South owes, besides many other works, the immortal recumbent statue of General Lee on the hero’s tomb at Lexington that to my mind is as noble as any piece of memorial sculpture in Italy or Greece, worthy to lie upon the glorious sarcophagus (called that of the great Alexander) that stands in the museum at Constantinople.

The Chevalier Moses Ezekiel, a sculptor also born in Richmond, but long resident in Rome, where he won his title and high honors from the Italian Government, has sent back to his native country many examples of his ripely cultured art. The “Virginia Mourning Her Dead,” presented by him to the campus of the Virginia Military Institute, where he was a student in early youth; his bronze “Homer,” recently installed at the University of Virginia; his “Jefferson,” in Louisville, Kentucky; and his promised “Stonewall Jackson,” still I believe in his atelier in the classic quarter of the Baths of Diocletian at Rome, will enduringly attest the fame of Virginia s wandering son.

William L. Sheppard, of Richmond, early transferred his scene of activity as a clever draughtsman, colonist, and modeller of war statuettes to New York, where his art is familiar in the Harpers’ publications and in other prominent Journals and magazines.

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Poor Alexander Galt, a modest and gentle fellow who did good work in marbles representing some of our leaders, came occasionally to visit us. He had asked my mother’s permission to make a bust of her daughter, and the preliminary sketch, etc., was done, another appointment settled, etc., when we heard to our grief and horror that he was lying dangerously ill of contagious smallpox, of which he shortly died.

A protיgי of General Wise was Conrad Wise Chapman, a young artist from Italy, son of my mother’s friend, John G. Chapman, who had painted her at eighteen in “The Baptism of Pocahontas” for the Rotunda at Washington. He left Rome to come over and enlist in the Confederate army, and saw varied service. A number of etchings of his battle scenes were put into circulation. We met him later at his own studio in the Twenty-third Street Building, corner of Fourth Avenue, New York, in which city, I think, he still abides.

I could never employ the critical faculty in my estimate of the work of John A. Elder, an artist of Fredericksburg, Virginia, simply because his treatment of Confederate subjects so gripped my heart that tears prevented a closer scrutiny. His “Appomattox,” “The Crater,” and “The Scout’s Prize” have stood the test of years.

No feeling heart in Richmond failed to yield tender sympathy to the President’s family in the calamity that befell them when little, merry, happy “Joe,” petted by all visitors to the Executive Mansion - he who, when his father was in the act of receiving official visitors, once pushed his way into the study and, clad only in an abbreviated night-gown, insisted upon saying his evening prayer at the President’s knee - fell from the porch in

Page 182 the rear of their dwelling and was picked up dead on the brick pavement underneath. From Burton Harrison, upon whom devolved all arrangements in behalf of the stricken parents, we heard a pitiful tale of the mother’s passionate grief and the terrible self-control of the President, who, shutting himself in his own room, had walked the floor without ceasing all of the first night. To the bier of the little lad, it seemed that every child in Richmond brought flowers and green leaves.

The battle of the Wilderness, on May 6, 1864, and its terrible sequel, of musketry setting fire to brush and undergrowth on the field where dead and wounded were alike wrapped in flame and smoke during one long appalling night; the serious wounding of Lieutenant-General Longstreet; the battles of Spottsylvania Court House on May 10 and 12, with the death of Stuart near the Yellow Tavern on the later date, renewed all the old strain of continual yearning over the fortunes of our army. The horrors of the slaughter at Cold Harbor, on June 3, in which the Union amy lost over 13,000 men, the result, it was said, of little over one hour’s fighting, and the beginning of the siege of Petersburg, focussed emotion. It did not seem we could stand more of these “bludgeonings of Fate.”

My mother, for some time inactive in her nursing, declared she could rest no longer. She had been out to visit the hospital at Camp Winder, in a barren suburb of the town, where the need of nurses was crying. My aunt, Mrs. Hyde, deciding to accompany her, they were soon installed there, my mother as division matron, in charge of a number of rude sheds serving as shelter for the patients, my aunt controlling a dispensary of food for the sufferers. It had been proposed that I should remain

Page 183 in town with friends, but my first glance at my mother’s accommodations in the camp made me resolve to share them and try to do my part. To the nurses and matrons was allotted one end of a huge Noah’s Ark, built of unpainted pine, divided by a partition, the surgeons occupying the other end. Near by were the diet kitchens and store-rooms, around which were gathered wards and tents, the whole camp occupying an arid, shadeless, sun-baked plain, without grass or water anywhere, encircled by a noxious trench too often used to receive the nameless dיbris of the wards. To my mother, and myself as a volunteer aid to her, was assigned a large bare room with rough-boarded walls and one window, a cot in each corner, two chairs, a table, and washing apparatus. Then a kind lady coming to see us and declaring she was about to remove to the country and had nowhere to store a roomful of furniture, we fell heir to some nice old bits of mahogany, a folding-screen, a matting rug, a mirror, and a pair of white muslin curtains. While my mother was absent one day upon her rounds, I invoked the aid of a nice old colored man, and presto! our room was changed into a bower, bed and sitting room combined. When the curtain was hung up at the window - looking to the west, where each evening the sun sank, sending up a fountain of radiance behind a belt of inky pines - and tied back with my one blue sash, I had a bright idea. We would have a box of growing flowers nailed to the outside of the sill. Enlisting the services of my friendly darky to secure a box for me, he soon returned with what seemed exactly the right thing. When he told me it had been given him by the surgeons and had contained artificial legs my zeal decreased - but we covered it with bark from the woodshed, I bought somewhere plants of ivy,

Page 184 geraniums, and sweet alyssum, and, in the end, our window-garden was the envy of the camp. Just when I had finished arranging my new bailiwick, a couple of rosy Irish sisters, good, loving souls employed in the hospital, came in to bring me linen sheets and pillowcases spun by their mother in the old country and given to them for their weddings in the New World - “an’ seein’ the Yankees don’t seem of a mind to spare us husbands anyhow, we’d be proud for you to use ‘em, miss, in your be-youtiful room that’s like a palace beside the rest.”

Alas! the heat, the smell of the wounds, and close confinement to her rounds brought upon my mother the only illness I could remember, for her muscles and nerves always seemed to be made of iron. It was fortunately brief, and I then took my turn at the same trouble. But our initiation to Camp Winder over, we soon found forgetfulness of discomfort in the awful realities of brave men’s suffering on every hand. I followed my mother in her rounds, aiding and supplementing her. Ere long, I found certain patients who in due course were relegated entirely to my care, with a ward helper in attendance. My whole heart passed into the work. I could hardly sleep for wishing to be back in those miserable cheerless wards, where dim eyes would kindle feebly at sight of me and trembling lips gave me last messages to transmit to those they would never see again. Once, going into one of my mother’s wards, I found my way blocked by an arm lying on the floor, and the surgeons who had just amputated it still at work on Cavanagh, one of our favorite patients, a big, gentle Irishman, always courteous and considerate. The blood was gushing profusely from the flaps they were sewing together, and for a moment I paused uncertain. “Can you stand

Page 185 it?” asked one of the doctors kindly. “If so, there’s a little help needed, as we’re short-handed this morning.” I stayed, and in a moment I saw clear and all seemed easier. When they hurried off, leaving Cavanagh to me, he came out of chloroform looking me full in the eyes, as I stood sponging his forehead. “So it’s gone at last, the poor old arm we worked so hard to save,” I said, trying to speak lightly. “Yes, miss, but it’s not meself you should be thinkin’ about,” he answered, “an’ you standin’ by, dirtyin’ your dress with the blood o’ me.” Cavanagh, I am glad to say, got well and left the hospital, swearing eternal fealty to his nurse.

One night, following a day when the cannon had not ceased till sunset, we were awakened by an orderly coming to tell my mother that a lot of new wounded had been brought in from the field and were still coming. They were putting them in a new ward just built at the far end of the camp, but had actually no food or stimulant to give them. Did Mrs. Cary think she could possibly spare a little from her store-room, since many of these poor fellows had been in the ambulance since the day before, some without a mouthful passing their lips?

We sprang up, hurried into our clothes, and were outside in a few minutes. My mother, unlocking her stores with a sinking heart, found she had but one bucket of milk, a small bottle of brandy, a piece of cold boiled pork, and a pile of cold corn-bread. With our arms full, we stumbled in the darkness over the rough ground, following the orderly and his lantern. If we had spilt that precious milk our hearts would have broken then and there!

The Southern night had spent its early heat, and a wandering breeze laden with wood odors came up from

Page 186 the river and smote our foreheads gratefully. At the door of the new ward, a long pine shed, ambulances were disgorging their ghastly contents, some of the wounded uttering pitifully prayers to be left to die in peace, some mercifully in stupor, while other forms were lifted out already stiffened in their last sleep. Those for whom the jolting ride from the battle-field had not finished the work of the enemy’s bullets were carried in and laid on the cots, and by the insufficient glimmer of oil lanterns and tallow dips the surgeons began their rounds. Before they were half finished, a streak of saffron came into the sky seen through the open windows, and in the sparse trees on the outskirts of the camp, birds had begun to stir and chirp. We placed our supplies on a table near the door, and my mother, telling me the surgeons needed her assistance, bade me find out the exact number to be fed and “make it go around.” Ah! that division of meagre portions! Never since, have I been able to endure with complacency seeing the waste of food in peace times. When, aided by the ward helpers, I began to distribute it, some were past swallowing, and their more vigorous neighbors looked with covetous eyes upon the poor rejected bits. To hurry by carrying off these morsels, to take cups away from thirsty lips before they were satisfied, was a keen sorrow.

At length, when I had nearly finished the task and almost exhausted my resources, I came upon a cot where lay upon his face a mere boy apparently dying. There was no time to call a doctor. I mixed milk and brandy, and after forcing his body over poured it by teaspoonfuls down his throat, keeping on till I had the joy of seeing the vital spark creep back. Little by little he reached the point of opening his eyes, and telling me he didn’t exactly know what was the matter with him,

Page 187 but that he felt “so tired.” As soon as I could capture my favorite doctor, I brought him to my patient. A wound was found, but a slight one. The lad was simply dying from exhaustion, the joggling of hours in the ambulance, and want of food. “He may thank his stars you kept on trying,” said my doctor, “or he’d have been a dead one before now. Think of children like this put into the ranks to fill the places of the seasoned men they’ve killed for us!”

This patient also recovered on our hands, and in due time went back to his “old woman” in North Carolina, whose poor, scrawling letters to her son I had to read and answer for him. While at Camp Winder he was indulged by me to an extent that caused some jealousy and cutting comment from his neighbors in the ward. For him were reserved all the tidbits I could lay hands upon, but fortunately he went home before he was too badly spoiled.

If we had visitors, there was nowhere to receive them, so the few I allowed to come appeared during my off time in the afternoon, and took me out to walk. With the private secretary of the President, who never came save with some welcome book in hand, I oftenest wandered out of the grim precincts of Camp Winder into the woods above the canal and river bank, where we would sit under the shelving boughs and watch the silent boats steal by below, reading, talking, and trying to forget the incubus of war. Here the air knew no taint, wild flowers sprung profusely, there was no sound save that of the chafing river. Sometimes, on the canal-boats gliding past, the negro deck-hands would sing in plaintive chorus, or play an obligato upon some wind instrument dying in the distance like horns of Elfland. Walking back in the evening, we carried bouquets

Page 188 and sprays of foliage arranged while we sat; some for my own quarters, most of them for patients lying alone in the tents where they put infected wounds. These last had my deepest sympathy, so childlike they were in their terror of being shut out of the wards and left day and night alone save for the rare visits possible where there were so many needing attention. We generally timed ourselves to reach camp at sunset, just as the one-armed and one-legged soldier on duty at the headquarters flag-staff lowered the stars and bars to their evening rest, afterward performing upon his asthmatic bugle a melancholy strain. Then I had an hour of duty in feeding the patients in our ward who could not help themselves, and after that my mother, my aunt and I repaired to a bare refectory on the ground-floor of our Noah’s Ark, where we shared with innumerable flies a coarse and insufficient evening meal.

To multiply instances of our work among the sufferers that long, long summer would be monotonous. I depict it as an example of a life led by hundreds of women of the South - women who had mostly come out of beautiful and luxurious homes. My mother, previously a volunteer, was now a paid servant of government, and, of what she received, spent the greater part in amplifying the conveniences and supplies of her diet kitchen. We were then in straits for everything considered indispensable in the outfit of modern hospitals. Our surgeons, working with pure devotion, were at their wits end to renew needful appliances. Without going into painful detail, I can say that our experience was continually shocking and distressing, as were the burials of our dead in a field by Hollywood, six or seven coffins dropped into one yawning pit, and hurriedly covered in, all that a grateful country could render

Page 189 in return for precious lives. All told, that Camp Winder episode was the most ghastly I ever knew. If we had possessed enough of any one hospital requisite it would have been less grim!

In June, 1864, my brother, who had been under fire repeatedly that spring aboard the ironclad Virginia, in the campaign against Butler below Drury’s Bluff, was ordered back to the school-ship for examination, becoming passed midshipman. Thence he was sent to the Chickamauga, at Wilmington, then fitting out for a destructive cruise which she was to watch her opportunity of making. Often when my mother and I returned from the hospital rounds to our pine barracks, heated red-hot by the torrid Southern sun, we would sit down to rest weary bones and speculate about our wanderer - whether he was yet out upon the deep that tells no tales, his ship to be shattered by a broadside from the blockading fleet, and he to go down in her, without a chance to send us a last message or farewell; less happy in that regard than the young fellows from whose brows we had that day wiped the death damps, whilst charging ourselves with letters to their beloved ones in far Southern homes.

It is a long lane that has no turning, and my holiday came at last. Late in the summer a small house-party, consisting of two men and two girls, was made welcome at “The Retreat.” Spite of all drawbacks and darkest prospects, youth and happiness emerged triumphant from the shadows, making the week one of immemorial incident. After the male guests went back to duty, one of them, returning for a “weekend” visit, left Richmond on horseback late Saturday evening, rode all night, his horse swimming a river wherever the ferryman was absent, spent Sunday with us, and rode back

Page 190 through the night, just arriving in time for a certain official breakfast-table on Monday, where the mystery of his absence created endless humorous speculations, even from his stately chief.

A year later, the gay rider was in rigorous confinment in the casemate of a Northern fortress, fighting fate hourly within his valiant soul. The other - true knight, true lover, tried and proved leader of armies in the field - lay in his hero’s grave in Hollywood, his radiant bride a stricken widow, whose story passed into tradition as among the saddest of the war.

My cousin Hetty and I lingered on in the country until my holiday ended disastrously. A sudden sharp illness - “Pamunkey fever,” they called it, following the long stretch of hospital work in summer heat - summoned my mother from Richmond to attend me. She arrived in an ambulance, finding me, however, so much on the mend that I was able to drive back with her through the crimson and golden glories of the Pamunkey Swamps.

Things, as I recall them, seem to have rushed onward with the speed of lightning during the last winter of the war. We had again settled ourselves in quarters in town. I had recovered my full strength, and was almost always hungry. We had little money, little food. It was impossible to draw upon our funds in Washington, and my mother, with a number of ladies, took a situation to sign banknotes in the Treasury Department. In what they called “Mr. Memminger’s reception-room,” she daily met gentlewomen, in whose veins ran the purest currents of cavalier and Huguenot blood. The names written upon those banknotes might have served to illustrate the genesis of Southern aristocracy.

This time we had been able to secure only one room

Page 191 in a friend’s house, with the use of her drawing-room and dining-room and service of her cook, the latter being a nominal one only; our breakfast, at 8 A.M., consisting of corn-bread with the drippings of fried bacon instead of butter, and coffee made of dried beans and peanuts, without milk or sugar. For luncheon we had, day in and day out, bacon, rice, and dried apples sweetened with sorghum. For our evening repast were served cakes made of corn-meal and water, eaten with sorghum molasses, and more of that unspeakable coffee. I cannot remember getting up from any meal that winter without wishing there were more of it. I went once to call upon a family antecedently wealthy, and found father, mother, and children making their dinner upon soup-plates filled with that cheerless compound known as “Benjamin” hard-tack, soaked in hot water, sprinkled with salt or brown sugar. It is to be said, however, there was in our community no discussion of diets, fads, or cures, and the health chase of modern society was an unknown quantity. People in better physical condition than the besieged dwellers of Richmond, when their cause was beginning to feel the death-clutch at its throat, were certainly not to be found.

Page 192 CHAPTER IX

THE question of executive policy was by no means left at rest among the exponents of public opinion in Richmond. While there was a large faction supporting the President in his disapproval of General Johnston’s method of playing the game of war with General Sherman, in northern Georgia, many a bitter comment was heard upon Mr. Davis’s final action in relieving Johnston of his command. People we met said outspokenly that the Executive’s animus against Johnston was based upon a petty feud between their wives, who had been daily associates and friends in the old Washington days. Others warmly defended Mr. Davis, declaring that the brilliant and aggressive Hood was the general of all others to make up for Johnston’s delay in bringing matters to a crisis.

It is certain that Johnston felt keenly the blow of his removal. One of my cousins, close to this general throughout the war, told me the great soldier shed tears of bitter mortification upon his removal, and that he heard him say:

“I had drawn and drawn and drawn Sherman, and just when I got him where I wanted him to be, I was taken away.”

And now for a stirring chapter in family annals, supplied by our midshipman, between whom and his mother and sister the veil of silence and uncertainty had fallen for several months. I knew that England had struck her fiercest blow at Spain by preying upon her

Page 193 commerce in open waters; that France, in the Seven Years’ War, had sent numbers of bold privateers to destroy shipping off the English coast and in the Irish Sea; that, following these depredations, “all England had gone mad after privateering,” and had sent out hundreds of vessels great and small to put the Frenchmen back in their proper places. Any one might read of the liberal use made by America in her war for independence of the fleets of commissioned privateers sent forth to harry Britain upon the ocean. It was all fair-play according to historical precedent, and our President had issued letters of marque and reprisal to private armed ships to do their best against Northern merchant-men. All that one felt in cold blood, however, was swept away in the thrilling excitement of actual adventure.

I may here state that a diary (exacted of their midshipmen by the Confederate navy, following the old-time custom of the navies of England and the United States), kept by my brother on the cruise of the Chickamauga and during the siege of Fort Fisher, achieved, unexpectedly to him, the honor of passing into the archives of the State Department at Washington, where, in “Room 311, Case 21,” this boy’s record of sea adventure is now preserved. Found in the naval school after the occupation of Richmond by Lieutenant-Commander James Parker, U. S. N., it was sent by him to the Navy Department in Washington. “The journal of Midshipman Cary,” says Commander Parker, “seemed to me a very important and valuable contribution to the naval side of a dispute between Admiral Porter and General Butler as to the propriety of the withdrawal of the troops at Fort Fisher. It was just such a journal as I would have kept in my midshipman days fifteen or

Page 194 more years before; and its entire truthfulness and correctness were apparent, colored as they were by boyish enthusiasm and frankness of statement.

“I promptly sent it to the Navy Department. I heard no more of it until its reappearance several years later in evidence before the Geneva Tribunal; where it contributed largely to fix the responsibility of Great Britain for the destruction of our shipping by these Confederate cruisers, whose doings were faithfully chronicled in the journal.”

How the diary came to be discovered in the files of the Navy Department by those charged with preparing the case of the United States for the Geneva Tribunal, and extracts from it edited for that case, Mr. Cary has never heard. It was not until the publication of the arbitration proceedings in 1871 that he learned of the continued existence of his almost forgotten journal, or that it had so contributed to the making of history.

“The purpose of the production of the journal,” writes Mr. Cary, “was to show that the British had granted undue favors to the Chickamauga during her call at their neutral port at St. George’s in Bermuda, both in respect of coal supply and length of stay.” In the “Opinions of Sir Alexander Cockburn,” a privy councillor and lord chief-justice of England, and one of the arbitrators at Geneva, occurs the following:

“The only authority for this statement (i. e., as to the Chickamauga’s overstaying her time limit of 24 hours at Bermuda and her receipt there of 82 tons of coal instead of the prescribed 25) is the diary of a midshipman who was serving on board the ship. The diary is not unamusing, and is not without its value…. In the result, the whole question becomes immaterial. We see from Mr. Cary’s diary that the Chickamauga

Page 195 arrived at Wilmington, where this young officer unfortunately ‘slipped up on his expectations,’ on the 19th of November without having fallen in with, taken, or destroyed a single United States vessel. The coaling at Bermuda therefore did not the least injury to the United States, and cannot in any point of view found a claim for damages.”

Lord Chief-Justice Cockburn’s satirical quotation of a bit of American boy’s slang, as italicized above, gives my brother occasion to observe that his unpretending little journal “evoked the sole suggestion of humor that appears to have enlivened the grave international proceedings here concerned.”

To go back to the beginning of the Chickamauga’s cruise in October, 1864, succeeding a long delay in Wilmington harbor and several abortive attempts to nose her way out through the blockading squadron. “In profound silence; lights all dowsed, engine hatches and even the slightest glow of the binnacle lamp alike carefully shrouded; her furnaces crammed with picked Cardiff coal that would neither smoke nor flare from the funnels, deck orders were passed in whispers. At last we were off, on a wild night of October 28th, with easterly squalls and inky skies and a lumpy sea - creeping at first, furtively…. Some of the obstructing ships were dimly seen tossing like tiny dots against a ragged eastern sky line.”

Here is how running the blockade appeared to Midshipman Cary, “on duty forward in the darkness and slop of the top-gallant-forecastle deck, feeling the quivering plunges of the little cruiser and the chill edges of the short rough seas which bucketted down my shivery neck.

Page 196

“A shuddering anxious touch on the sand rip, and then signal lights in jagged lines of red and white suddenly flashed across the broken water; there was a glare of partial broadsides, lighting alien guns and guns’ crews and a bit of black rigging overhead; there were the whiz of harmless shells aloft, then a puzzled lull among the enemy, followed by their chasing rockets! Meanwhile the Chickamauga underwent a lively change! On the instant her sloppy staggering decks became the scene of greatest activity. Back went the coal bags (extra cruising fuel piled forward to lighten her after weight) hustled aft, somehow or anyhow, whether on trucks or by hand; to clear the guns and charge the trim, with officers in full swing of commanding energy; the boatswain and his mates heard at over concert pitch, using characteristic language - and the Chickamauga escaped her foe, going away eastward at her best fourteen knot gait!”

Next morning, eluding a persistent chaser, the cruiser began her hot work of as active a career of destruction as may be found. Upon her first prize, the bark Mark L. Potter, were found china-ware of which they had almost none, and all sorts of food from “plum-pudding to pickles.” Close by the Capes of Delaware three more prizes fell into their hands - the bark Emily D. Hall, sugar laden from Cardenas to Boston; the crack clipper ship Shooting Star, “a cloud of snowy canvas from her graceful hull to her tapering top-gallant masts,” and another bark, the Albion Lincoln, which, bonded and released, served to relieve them of the four crews of paroled prisoners already in their hands. The Shooting Star, from New York, with supplies for the United States Pacific Squadron, was a rich find, containing, above all things desirable, a cargo of fine coal. Her

Page 197 burning in the winter twilight was a glorious spectacle, the comedy element of her capture being that of the captain’s wife, Mrs. Drinkwater, “who ignominiously routed in turn all the young officers of the Chickamauga” until the Lincoln relieved them of the shrewish lady’s presence.

Struck by a gale of wind lasting seven days, the Chickamauga then made her way to Bermuda, where our midshipman was sent ashore to face Yellow Jack and look up deserters, and, after sundry individual adventures, set sail again in the cruiser for Wilmington and home, contriving to run in under the veil of a thick fog, upon whose sudden lifting next morning they found themselves face to face with the whole blockading squadron of the enemy! After an hour’s hot fight, shot and shell raining fiercely around them, Fort Fisher came to their aid, firing aimlessly but enough to frighten off the fleet. “We started in, got stuck on a sand bar, when behold the blockaders were down on us again, but by lightening the ship we succeeded in gliding over the bar to safety.”

From the midshipmen of Battery Buchanan, on the shore at the river’s mouth, a signal by flags was fluttered to the midshipmen on the victorious Chickamauga, to this import: “For Heaven’s sake send us some Yankee china. We are eating our soup out of cigar boxes!” This, when Captain Wilkinson and his first lieutenant of the Chickamauga were eagerly expecting official instructions, may have been said to break down the ceremony of the occasion!

A brief rest for our youngster brought him to Christmas holidays of a memorable sort. By requisition of Major General Whiting, commanding the land forces at Fort Fisher, soon to be the scene of fierce conflict, my

Page 198 brother was sent with two lieutenants and twenty-five picked men of the Chickamauga’s crew, to man navy guns mounted on unfinished batteries within the fort. On Christmas eve the United States fleet with 580 guns, headed by ironclads, moved in and attacked the fort, throwing all kinds of projectiles from a three-inch bolt to a fifteen-inch shell. “The grandest sight of my life,” wrote the young participant. “The firing on both sides was heavy all day.”

Our one Christmas gift that year, received with tears and smiles, was an item in the official report of Major-General Whiting, sent on from the Navy Department by our good friend Commodore S. S. Lee, whose son, Daniel Murray Lee, was a midshipman on the Chickamauga.

“To passed Midshipman Cary, I wish to give personal thanks. Though wounded, he reported after the bursting of his gun to repel the threatened assault, and actively assisted Colonel Tansill on the land front.”

We had already heard that our boy’s wound was on the mend, and could afford to rejoice without alloy.

From the law offices of Cary & Whitridge, 59 Wall Street, New York, in 1902, my brother wrote to me as follows:

“The enclosed may interest you, for certainly the circumstance is extraordinary, if only in the sense that it can never possibly - with all its antecedents, etc. - occur again.”

Extract of letter from Bartlett S. Johnson to Clarence Cary, dated December 3, 1902:

“What you say about the three Confederate midshipmen on the Virginia Debt Reorganization Committee had already occurred to me. I think it shows that our fasting and privation kept our stomachs in good shape

Page 199 and still keeps us among the live men of the day. Then our grit - pardon me for classing myself with you and Newton - has something to do with it. I always had more than a friendly feeling toward you. It is close to affection, and dates back from the day when the men cheered you after Fort Fisher fight.”

Mr. Cary further writes to his sister:

“This correspondence shows a bit of diversion by the way in the thorny paths of business. I think you will feel a sort of clutch about the throat if not a slight moisture of the eyes. Of course the ‘cheering’ referred to our ship’s little ragged remnant of mates returning after hard knocks.

“We had an exposed, unfinished part of the fort to hold, had to show off before the soldier chaps and had our own two big guns burst under our noses, the whole with a net result that nineteen out of our twenty-six men were killed or wounded.

“So you see it was not unnatural that our shipmates aboard of the C. S. Chickamauga should give us a cheer when we got back; or perhaps that the army and the other forts along our route did likewise. I protest, as Thackeray would say, I can’t now think with equanimity of that ox-cart load of removable wounded and their ragged, bandaged, shabby survivors alongside, stumbling through the heavy sand, after two days of hell, la bas, in Fort Fisher. It seems so ridiculously far off, too, and there is a pathetic side about the youth of its actors. Our oldest must have been Lieutenant Roby, of the mature age of twenty-six. Dornin, the other lieutenant, perhaps a year older, stayed behind to await amputation that day performed upon his leg.”

As a final chapter of this episode, I have received, when my work is nearly finished, a letter from my brother’s

Page 200 friend and shipmate of Confederate navy days, Colonel James Morris Morgan, of Washington, himself sufficiently acquainted with the methods of gallant service to be a trusted reporter of Mr. Cary’s youthful prowess.

“When Fort Fisher was threatened, two of the guns of the Chickamauga were taken ashore and mounted in the fort. Midshipman Cary was in charge of one of them, and during the battle his gun burst, killing and wounding some twenty odd men who were standing near it. Cary was unhurt and, walking up to General Whiting, asked if he could not give him something more to do. The Federal fleet was at that time sweeping the beach with six hundred guns. General Whiting expressed his desire to get a communication to a detached battery some hundreds of yards away, but said he would not order any man to carry it, as he considered it hardly possible that the feat could be accomplished under such a fire. Midshipman Cary begged to be allowed to attempt the perilous journey. Lieutenant Roby and Midshipman Berrian, who were present, described the scene to me, and several of my old classmates, who were with the Federal fleet, have borne testimony to the accuracy of their statements.

“It seems that hardly had the little midshipman started on his way when the shells from the fleet ploughed the sand from under his feet and down he went into the hole made. There was a groan from the fort as some one exclaimed, ‘Little Cary’s gone!’ and then, to their relief, they saw him struggle to his feet and trudge on. This happened again and again, until at last, as he neared the battery, a shell was seen to explode very near him which fairly buried him in the sand. All in the fort gave him up for dead when, suddenly, to their amazement, they saw him totter to his feet again, though wounded in

Page 201 the leg. The fleet ceased firing and, as he staggered on to his destination, both the men in the fort and on board the fleet broke into a mighty cheer. This is the only occasion I ever knew of during the war when a man heard both sides cheer him.”

The engagement of my cousin Hetty Cary to Brigadier-General John Pegram having been announced, their decision to be married on January 19 was a subject of active interest. My aunt, Mrs. Wilson Miles Cary, of Baltimore, had before Christmas obtained from Mr. Lincoln, through General Barnard (chief of the United States Engineer Corps, married to her adopted daughter), a pass to go to Richmond to visit her children. The presence of Mrs. Cary gave General Pegram opportunity to urge that his marriage should not be longer delayed, and such preparations as were possible were hurried on. My aunt was stopping at the house of her niece, Mrs. Peyton, whence the ceremony took place. On the evening of January 19 all our little world flocked to St. Paul’s Church to see the nuptials of one called by many the most beautiful woman in the South, with a son of Richmond universally honored and beloved. Two days before, I being confined to my room with a cold, Hetty had come, bringing her bridal veil that I, with our mothers, might be the first to see it tried on her lovely crown of auburn hair. As she turned from the mirror to salute us with a charming blush and smile, the mirror fell and was broken to small fragments, an accident afterward spoken of by the superstitious as one of a strange series of ominous happenings.

While a congregation that crowded floor and galleries of the church waited an unusually long time for the arrival of bride and groom, my aunt and the other members

Page 202 of our family being already in their seats, I stood in the vestibule outside with Burton Harrison and Colonel L. Q. C. Lamar, speculating rather uneasily upon the cause of the delay. Mr. Harrison told us that Mrs. Davis (who tenderly loved and admired the bride) had begged to be allowed to send the President’s carriage to drive her to the church, and he was sure it had been in prompt attendance at Colonel Peyton’s door. Directly after, a shabby old Richmond hack drove up, halting before the church, and from it issued the bride and groom, looking a little perturbed, explaining that at the moment of setting out the President’s horses had reared violently, refusing to go forward, and could not be controlled, so that they had been forced to get out of the carriage and send for another vehicle, at that date almost impossible to secure in Richmond.

When the noble-looking young couple crossed the threshold of the church, my cousin dropped her lace handkerchief and, nobody perceiving it, stooped forward to pick it up, tearing the tulle veil over her face to almost its full length, then, regaining herself, walked with a slow and stately step toward the altar. As she passed there was a murmur of delight at her beauty, never more striking. Her complexion of pearly white, the vivid roses on her cheeks and lips, the sheen of her radiant hair, and the happy gleam of her beautiful brown eyes seemed to defy all sorrow, change, or fear. John Pegram, handsome and erect, looked as he felt, triumphant, the prize-winner - so the men called him - of the invincible beauty of her day. Miss Cary’s brother, Captain Wilson Miles Cary, representing her absent father, gave away the bride. After the ceremony we, her nearest, crowded around the couple, wishing them the best happiness our loving hearts could picture.

Page 203 General Pegram’s mother, brothers, and sisters did the same; then, as they passed out, all eyes followed them with real kindness and unalloyed good feeling. There was but a small reception afterward, but one felt in the atmosphere a sense of sincere gladness in happy love, very rare on such occasions.

Three weeks later, to the day, General Pegram’s coffin, crossed with a victor’s palms beside his soldier’s accoutrements, occupied the spot in the chancel where he had stood to be married. Beside it knelt his widow swathed in crape. Again Dr. Minnegerode conducted the ceremony, again the church was full. Behind the hearse, waiting outside, stood his war charger, with boots in stirrups. The wailing of the band that went with us on the slow pilgrimage to Hollywood will never die out of memory. Burton Harrison drove in the carriage with me and my mother, my poor cousin with her mother, brother, and General Custis Lee, her husband’s intimate friend, who stood beside her, as, leaning on her brother’s arm, she remained during the service close to the grave. General Pegram’s family clustered beyond her. Snow lay white on the hill-sides, the bare trees stretched their arms above us, the river kept up its ceaseless rush and tumble, so much a part of daily life in our four years of ordeal that we had grown accustomed to interpret its voice according to our joy or grief.

The newly married couple had gone directly to General Pegram’s headquarters, near Petersburg, where he was at the head of Early’s division. Their new home was in a pleasant farm-house nine miles out of Petersburg, close to the line of General Pegram’s command, near Hatcher’s Run. Here, within constant sound of shot and shell, her taste and skill busied itself in fitting up rooms that seemed to her soldier the perfection of

Page 204 beauty and comfort, and in preparing for him little dishes that transformed their ordinary fare. When she rode beside him during their short honey-moon, the men thronged to look at her with pride in their leader’s lovely wife. On February 5 a demonstration was made by the enemy against General Lee’s extreme right, in which General Pegram’s forces were engaged. He returned to their lodgings and, before daylight on the 6th, was aroused by the information that the enemy was about to renew attack. His wife made coffee and prepared breakfast for him in the gray of dawn; then, after seeing him ride off, spent the day with her mother, who had fortunately arrived upon a visit to her son, Captain Cary. As the short winter’s day closed in, a messenger arrived from General Pegram to say he had come safely through the fight.

The ladies were at this time sitting in an ambulance at some distance away carding lint. At sunset a new charge was formed against the enemy, General Pegram leading it, sword in hand, when a minie-ball (claimed to have been fired by a sharp-shooter a great way off) entered his heart, killing him instantly, after striking the sword from his hand and filling its scabbard with his blood. Of his comrades, none was found who would volunteer to break the news to my cousin.

Captain Gordon McCabe, of Richmond, a close friend of General Pegram, has thus written to me:

“I can tell you of the tragic time after he was killed, when our guns pulled past the ambulance where she was carding lint and I heard her laughing merrily within. I knew he was dead, shot at the head of his division, while she sat there waiting for him to come to her.” After his body had been tenderly placed in the room used as the adjutant-general’s office at headquarters,

Page 205 word was sent to her that “she might safely return to their quarters and go to bed, for it would be late before he could get back.” So she slept peacefully that night, in the room above his body - a bride of three weeks.

In the morning an old gentleman, a civilian, volunteered to go up and call her down to where Pegram lay. Kneeling beside the body, she put her hand into the breast of his coat, drawing out first his watch, still ticking, that she had wound for him just before they parted; next, a miniature of herself, both stained with life blood. My aunt and her son accompanied the widow to Richmond in a freight car, she sitting beside the coffin. No one of us is likely to forget the sad days that followed. She was like a flower broken in the stalk.

Another ordeal was in store for her in the death in battle of General Pegram’s younger brother, Colonel William Pegram, who fell in the retreat from Petersburg. To remain with the mother of these heroes, during her time of crushing grief, was my cousin’s loving duty. A short time after the occupation, Mrs. Cary and Mrs. Pegram, accompanied by Captain Cary, returned to their home in Baltimore, with a free pass from General Grant.

At the end of March hope in the stoutest spirits seemed to flicker but feebly and the ultimate failure of the Confederacy to be a foregone conclusion. Coming in late from a walk on the evening of March 29, I found to my surprise a note from Burton Harrison, who had called in my absence to say that he was unexpectedly desired to take charge of Mrs. Davis, her sister, and the Davis children on a “visit” to Charlotte, North Carolina. He had just been for a farewell visit to Mrs. Wilson Miles Cary and Mrs. Pegram - “the saddest I ever knew” - and must hasten to the train, hoping to be back

Page 206 in town ere long, to find me “well and happy and light of heart.”

When I saw him again, it was in the following autumn, behind prison bars, after months of solitary confinement succeeding his capture with the chief whose fortunes he loyally chose to follow, when a dozen times he might have found opportunity to avoid his subsequent hard fate.

Page 207 CHAPTER X

ON the morning of April 2, a perfect Sunday of the Southern spring, a large congregation assembled as usual at St. Paul’s. I happened to sit in the rear of the President’s pew, so near that I plainly saw the sort of gray pallor that came upon his face as he read a scrap of paper thrust into his hand by a messenger hurrying up the middle aisle. With stern set lips and his usual quick military tread, he left the church, a number of other people rising in their seats and hastening after him, those who were left swept by a universal tremor of alarm. The rector, accustomed as he was to these frequent scenes in church, came down to the altar rail and tenderly begged his people to remain and finish the service, which was done.

Before dismissing his congregation the rector announced to them that General Ewell had summoned the local forces to meet for defence of the city at three in the afternoon. We knew then that Longstreet’s regulars must have been suddenly called away, and a sick apprehension filled all hearts.

On the sidewalk outside the church we plunged at once into the great stir of evacuation, preluding the beginning of a new era. As if by a flash of electricity, Richmond knew that on the morrow her streets would be crowded with her captors, her rulers fled, her government dispersed into thin air, her high hopes crushed to earth. There was little discussion of events. People meeting each other would exchange silent hand grasps

Page 208 and pass on. I saw many pale faces, some trembling lips, but in all that day I heard no expression of a weakling fear. Movement was everywhere, nowhere panic. Begarlanded Franklin Street, sending up perfume from her many gardens, was the general rendezvous of people who wanted to see the last of their friends. All over town citizens were aiding the departure of the male members of their family who could in any way serve the dispossessed government. In the houses we knew, there was everywhere somebody to be helped to go; somebody for whose sake tears were squeezed back, scant food prepared, words of love and cheer spoken. Those good, dear women of Richmond, who had been long tried as by fire, might bend but would not break.

Between two and three in the afternoon formal announcement was made to the public that the government would vacate Richmond that evening. By nightfall all the flitting shadows of a Lost Cause had passed away under a heaven studded by bright stars. The doomed city lay face to face with what it knew not.

In my “Confederate Album” is the original telegram from General J. C. Breckinridge, Secretary of War, to President Davis at Danville, describing the evacuation of Richmond. It is written upon a half sheet of cheap yellowish paper, and marked “206 / Collect 103.00,” and runs as follows: “RED HOUSE, VIA CLOVER STATION, “R. & D. R.R. “THE PRESDT.

“Evacuation of Richmond completed in order on morning of third. Genl. Lee concentrated pretty well about Amelia C. H. on 5th, but enemy occupied Junction that evening, and our forces moved during the night

Page 209 and morning of the 6th to Rice’s Station. During the morning we captured some eight hundred (800) prisoners, but in afternoon met a serious reverse, and portion of army placed across Appomattox at High Bridge and other points. I left Genl. Lee at Farmville yesterday morning, where he was passing main body across the River for temporary relief. He will still try to move around towards North Carolina. There was very little firing yesterday and I hear none to-day. No definite information as to movements of enemy from Junction towards Danville. Stoneman’s advance reported yesterday to be near Liberty. Lomax reports enemy in considerable force advancing up Shenandoah Valley. No news from Echols, but he is supposed to be close on Stoneman’s rear. Genl. Lee has sent orders to Lomax to unite with Echols against Stoneman and to Colston to make firm defence at Lynchburg. The straggling has been great and the situation not favorable. Genls. Gilmer, Lawton, and St. John are with me. We will join you as soon as possible. “J. C. BRECKINRIDGE, “Secy. of War.”

I had gone with my brother to the station in the afternoon, and saw him off with a heart that for the first time in our war partings felt heavier than lead. His farewell present to me was a ham, of which he unexpectedly came into possession after we had said good-by, sending it to me by a negro tipped with a large amount of Confederate currency, who, to his honor be it said, was faithful to his trust. My brother was aware that in addition to leaving me alone in our lodging (in my mother’s absence, gone to nurse my cousin Ethelbert Fairfax, wounded in the battle of Bentonville in

Page 210 North Carolina) our larder was very nearly bare. I had promised them if an emergency arose to go to my uncle’s house, where I presently arrived, my ham following!

I insert a letter written at this time: “GRACE STREET, RICHMOND, April 4,1865. “MY PRECIOUS MOTHER AND BROTHER:

“I write you this jointly, because I can have no idea where Clarence is. Can’t you imagine with what a heavy heart I begin it—? The last two days have added long years to my life. I have cried until no more tears will come, and my heart throbs to bursting night and day. When I bade you good-bye, dear, and walked home alone, I could not trust myself to give another look after you. All that evening the air was full of farewells as if to the dead. Hardly anybody went to bed. We walked through the streets like lost spirits till nearly daybreak. My dearest mother, it is a special Providence that has spared you this! Your going to nurse poor Bert at this crisis has saved you a shock I never can forget. With the din of the enemy’s wagon trains, bands, trampling horses, fifes, hurrahs and cannon ever in my ears, I can hardly write coherently. As you desired, in case of trouble, I left our quarters and came over here to be under my uncle’s wing. In Aunt M.‘s serious illness the house is overflowing; there was not a room or a bed to give me, but that made no difference, they insisted on my staying all the same. Up under the roof there was a lumber-room with two windows and I paid an old darkey with some wrecks of food left from our housekeeping, to clear it out, and scrub floor and walls and windows, till all was absolutely clean. A cot was found and some old chairs and tables - our

Page 211 own bed linen was brought over, and here I write in comparative comfort, so don’t bother about me!

“Hardly had I seemed to have dropped upon my bed that dreadful Sunday night - or morning rather - when I was wakened suddenly by four terrific explosions, one after the other, making the windows of my garret shake. It was the blowing up, by Admiral Semmes, by order of the Secretary of the Navy, of our gunboats on the James, the signal for an all-day carnival of thundering noise and flames. Soon the fire spread, shells in the burning arsenals began to explode, and a smoke arose that shrouded the whole town, shutting out every vestige of blue sky and April sunshine. Flakes of fire fell around us, glass was shattered, and chimneys fell, even so far as Grace Street from the scene.

“By the middle of the day poor Aunt M.‘s condition became so much worse in consequence of the excitement, the doctor said she positively could not stand any further sudden alarm. His one comfort is that you, his dear sister, are taking care of his wounded boy of whom his wife has been told nothing. It was suggested that some of us should go to headquarters and ask, as our neighbors were doing, for a guard for the house where an invalid lay so critically ill. Edith and I were the volunteers for service, and set out for the Capitol Square, taking our courage in both hands. Looking down from the upper end of the square, we saw a huge wall of fire blocking out the horizon. In a few hours no trace was left of Main, Cary, and Canal Streets, from 8th to 18th Streets, except tottering walls and smouldering ruins. The War Department was sending up jets of flame. Along the middle of the streets smouldered a long pile, like street-sweepings, of papers torn from the different departments’ archives of our beloved Government, from

Page 212 which soldiers in blue were picking out letters and documents that caught their fancy. The Custom House was the sole building that defied the fire amongst those environing the Square. The marble Statesman on the Monument looked upon queer doings that day, inside the enclosure from which all green was soon scorched out, or trampled down by the hoofs of cavalry horses picketted at intervals about it. Mr. Reed’s Church, Mrs. Stanard’s house, the Prestons’ house, are all burned; luckily the Lee house and that side of Franklin stand uninjured. General Lee’s house has a guard camped in the front yard.

“We went on to the headquarters of the Yankee General in charge of Richmond, that day of doom, and I must say were treated with perfect courtesy and consideration. We saw many people we knew on the same errand as ourselves. We heard stately Mrs. – and the –‘s were there to ask for food, as their families were starving. Thank God, we have not fallen to that! Certainly her face looked like a tragic mask carved out of stone.

“A courteous young lieutenant, now General Peck, U. S. A., was sent to pilot us out of the confusion, and identify the house, over which a guard was immediately placed. Already the town wore the aspect of one in the Middle Ages smitten by pestilence. The streets filled with smoke and flying fire were empty of the respectable class of inhabitants, the doors and shutters of every house tight closed.

“I ought to tell you the important news that your tin box of securities is safe and in my keeping. How do you think this happened? On Sunday, after Clarence left, and we were wandering around the streets like forlorn ghosts, I chanced to meet our friend, Mr. –, the president of the – Bank, in which I knew you

Page 213 kept them. He was very pale and wretched looking, said he could not vouch for the safe-keeping of anybody’s property, asked after you and wondered if I would feel like taking your papers in charge. I walked with him to the bank where he put the box in my hands and then I hurried back with it to my uncle’s house. I slept with the papers under my head Sunday night, and spent Monday afternoon in ripping apart the trimming of my gray beige skirt. You know that trimming, like a wide battlement of brown silk all around the hem? Well, into this wall of Troy I sewed with the tightest stitches I could make (you would say those were nothing to boast of, remembering the sleeve that came apart) every one of your precious documents. And here I am with the family fortune stitched into my frock, which I have determined to wear every day with a change of white bodices, till I see you or can get to some place where it is safe to take it off….”

I will say in concluding the episode of the hidden papers, that the next day after I had received them, the bank went down in the track of the awful Main Street fire, its contents destroyed utterly. I continued to wear the skirt, heartily sick of it before I dared lay the thing aside, until the day in late April when I went by flag of truce to Baltimore, and there, at the home of my uncle, Mr. Cary, extracted the papers, put them in a new tin box, and consigned them to proper safe-keeping. I have certainly never since worn a gown of the value of that one, ungratefully cast aside at the first opportunity!

“And what will you say when I tell you that my one and only book, like poor Mr. John R. Thompson’s ‘Across the Atlantic,’ has gone up in flames and smoke, in the establishment of ‘Messrs. West and Johnson, Publishers,’ who lost everything in the fire? A little

Page 214 while ago, I should have wanted to cry over this calamity. So many pages of good Confederate fool’s cap closely scribbled over; so much eloquence and pathos lost to the world forever! Really now, joking apart, if West and Johnson, who are clever men, hadn’t thought it worth publishing they wouldn’t have accepted it, would they? Now - now - nothing seems to hurt much, in the fall of our Confederacy. Perhaps my poor ‘Skirmishing’ has made more of a blaze in the world in this way, than it ever would have done in the ordinary course of events!”

Certainly that conclusion was the wisest I could have arrived at, and I lived to rejoice that this jejune effort never saw daylight! It was years before I again ventured into print. But I should like now to know what it was all about!

To resume the letter to my mother and brother: “The ending of the first day of occupation was truly horrible. Some negroes of the lowest grade, their heads turned by the prospect of wealth and equality, together with a mob of miserable poor whites, drank themselves mad with liquor scooped from the gutters. Reinforced, it was said, by convicts escaped from the penitentiary, they tore through the streets, carrying loot from the burnt district.” (For days after, even the kitchens and cabins of the better class of darkies displayed handsome oil paintings and mirrors, rolls of stuff, rare books, and barrels of sugar and whiskey.) “One gang of drunken rioters dragged coffins sacked from undertakers, filled with spoils from the speculators’ shops, howling so madly one expected to hear them break into the Carmagnole. Thanks to our trim Yankee guard in the basement, we felt safe enough, but the experience was not pleasant.

Page 215

“Through all this strain of anguish ran like a gleam of gold the mad vain hope that Lee would yet make a stand somewhere - that Lee’s dear soldiers would give us back our liberty.

“Dr. Minnegerode has been allowed to continue his daily services and I never knew anything more painful and touching than that of this morning when the Litany was sobbed out by the whole congregation.

“A service we went to the same evening at the old Monumental I never shall forget. When the rector prayed for ‘the sick and wounded soldiers and all in distress of mind or body,’ there was a brief pause, filled with a sound of weeping all over the church. He then gave out the hymn: ‘When gathering clouds around I view.’ There was no organ and a voice that started the hymn broke down in tears. Another took it up, and failed likewise. I, then, with a tremendous struggle for self-control, stood up in the corner of the pew and sang alone. At the words, ‘Thou Saviour see’st the tears I shed,’ there was again a great burst of crying and sobbing all over the church. I wanted to break down dreadfully, but I held on and carried the hymn to the end. As we left the church, many people came up and squeezed my hand and tried to speak, but could not. Just then a splendid military band was passing, the like of which we had not heard in years. The great swell of its triumphant music seemed to mock the shabby broken-spirited congregation defiling out of the gray old church buried in shadows, where in early Richmond days a theatre with many well-known citizens was burned! That was one of the tremendous moments of feeling I experienced that week.

“Dear Aunt E– (Mrs. Hyde) is still at Camp Winder, not yet reorganized under Federal rule. (I

Page 216 hope the poor creatures there will fare better than we could make them!) She wants to send to Redlands for Meta, then go through the lines to Bert Mason’s place as soon as the way is clear. She has been with me to-day and yesterday and says I must tell you her heart is broken.

“I walked around to the Campbells’ this morning. The Judge’s quiet determination to remain on in Richmond has produced some criticism, but his friends say that is nonsense. I looked over at the President’s house, and saw the porch crowded with Union soldiers and politicians, the street in front filled with curious gaping negroes who have appeared in swarms like seventeen-year locusts. The young leaves are just shaking out, the fruit trees a mass of blossoms - the grass vividly green, the air nectar. I come in from my melancholy walks and sit in this dull garret, and pine and yearn for - what?

“I have just seen the Evening Whig, issued under direction of a Northern editor. Governor Weitzel, the new U. S. Commandant, says in his telegram to Stanton: ‘The people received us with the wildest joy.’ That scene in the Monumental Church looked like it, don’t you think so? Mr. R. D’Orsey Ogden reopens the theatre to-night with one of his blood-and-thunder plays. Invitations have been sent to Lincoln and Stanton to be present at the manoeuvres (here a piece is torn from the original) the first we have had since the Occupation. Some of the shops in Broad Street are already restocked and opened by their Jewish proprietors and are doing a flourishing trade in greenback currency. We went into the Hall of Congress, finding there a sable official in uniform, seated writing at the Speaker’s desk. In the State Library there have been

Page 217 many pilferings of coins, medals and valuable papers. I noticed they had removed from the library railings all the captured Federal banners with which we had been able abundantly to drape them.”

Another letter of this time, addressed to Burton Harrison, then supposed to be with the Confederate President at Danville, Virginia, describes my efforts to meet his request (in a note sent in some way to me) to secure some packages of private letters left with his belongings at the President’s house.

“I had hoped that your things had been sent to your uncle’s home, but Mrs. Samuel Harrison informs me this is not so. She suggesting that the President’s housekeeper may be still in the house, I found this to be the case, so I went to the Campbells’, and sent a message across the street to ask Mrs. O’C. to come to me, which she did immediately. She was very nice and obliging, but when I asked about your trunks, said she had delivered all of your luggage to James Brown, your old servant at the President’s, to deposit at your uncle’s house. I asked where James could be found but felt rather hopeless, thinking a darkey’s probable view of the situation would include his right to everything left behind by the Southern Government. Fancy my delight when, soon after, while engaged in packing at our forsaken lodgings, James Brown himself walked in on me with a perfectly beaming face. We had a conference, and it appeared he had the trunks, letters, clothes, books all safe, waiting a good chance to carry them himself to your uncle’s, fearing they might be overhauled by Federal authority. I could not induce James to understand that my authority extended to letters alone, and finally had to break down in a hearty laugh when he

Page 218 persisted in enumerating the garments packed: ‘clothes on top of books, collars, and little things in trays,’ etc., etc., with much minuteness of detail.

“‘It’s all right, James; all I want is for you to get those letters out and bring them to me, and send the trunks to Mr. Samuel Harrison’s.’

“‘Suttenly, miss, suttenly. I perfectly apprehend the situation,’ is what James answered. ‘An’ I tell you truly that I have a prominent affection for Colonel Harrison. If he was a mother or a brother to me, I couldn’t love him any better.’

“He suggested, before we parted, that the hardest trouble of your lot must be your inability to send me any more little notes by him, saying: ‘I don’ know jes how it kin be managed, miss, unless Colonel Harrison could somehow dodge the government an’ git to see you. Don’ you think he mout dodge the government, miss?’

“While I write there is a commotion in the streets and rumor of a reverse to Yankee arms. Oh! if I dared believe it! A young woman has just passed wearing a costume composed of United States flags. The streets fairly swarm with blue uniforms and negroes decked in the spoils of jewelry shops, etc. It is no longer our Richmond, yet sometimes our eyes have a rest and are gladdened by the gray uniforms of the Confederate surgeons left here on parole to attend our sick and wounded soldiers. When one of them goes by, instantly every shutter is flung wide open, every cheek fluhes , every eye sparkles a welcome. One of the girls tells me she finds great comfort in singing ‘Dixie’ with her head buried in a feather pillow. My dear uncle, the most saintly of men, to-day read prayers to his assembled family, and having in hand an old-time prayer-book, inadvertently read out the petition for

Page 219 ‘the President of these United States.’ Edith, his youngest daughter, on our arising from our knees, immediately cried out in reproachful tones, ‘Oh! papa. You prayed for the President of the United States!’ ‘Did I?’ said the good old doctor ruefully. ‘Devil fetch him!’ at which we all laughed.

“Last night, from the sweetest of dreams, I was aroused by a band playing ‘Annie Laurie’ so beautifully it seemed to chime with my happier thoughts. Directly it changed to the majestic strains of ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ which I had not heard in four years. In one minute I was broad awake and weeping. Oh! that such a noble air should send such a pang to rend me!

“To-day, Mr. Lincoln, seated in an ambulance with his son Tad upon his knee, drove down Grace Street, past this house, a mounted escort clattering after.”

A short time only after these letters were penned came the tidings of Lee’s surrender, and then our streets were filled up again with the gray uniforms of soldiers on parole, dusty, threadbare, with tarnished buttons and insignia. I hope I may never again see men made in God’s image wear such sad faces as they did. We girls and women had all we could bear hearing the heartbreaking story of the final days before Appomattox, and giving such consolation as our own rent hearts could offer.

The war was over. What had it cost the country now to be ours again by force of arms? “More than seven hundred men a day,” says Professor Woodrow Wilson in his “History of the American People,” ” for every day of the four long years of campaign and battle; four hundred killed or mortally wounded in the field, the rest

Page 220 dead of disease, exposure, accident, or the slow pains of imprisonment. The Federal Government had spent thirty-four hundred millions of dollars upon the war - nearly two and a half millions for every day it lasted - and less than eight hundred millions of that vast sum had come into its coffers from the taxes. More than twenty-six hundred millions had been added to the National debt. The Confederacy had piled up a debt upon its part of nearly fourteen hundred millions and had spent besides no man could say how much. The North had spent out of its abundance. The South had spent all that it had, and was stripped naked of its resources. While the war lasted, it had been stripped naked also of its men.”

My chief personal interest in the trend of events after the surrender at Appomattox lay naturally with the retiring government. The story of that retreat and the capture of his chief was told by Burton Harrison in a paper written for his sons, which the editors of the Century Magazine secured for publication in their number of November, 1883. A letter from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, appended to my bound copy of this narrative, says: “It is of absorbing interest, told with evident frankness and truthfulness, and with a refreshing sense of humor giving the comedy along with the tragedy of the events. It would be one of the most interesting and important contributions to history that the Century has published, and I can see no reason why you should withhold it longer or till the generation which would take most interest in it, is passed away.”

The prophecy of general interest in the paper put forth by the editors had been assured to us on an occasion, soon after the war, when my husband reluctantly told the story, following a dinner at the Rev. Henry M.

Page 221 Field’s, at Stockbridge, Mass., where, among other hearers besides our clever and inspiring host and hostess, we had Mr. David Dudley Field, President Andrew White, of Cornell University, and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. It is true that much was lent to the narrative by the teller’s inimitable gift of narrative so well known to his friends, his extraordinary flow of words, and dramatic action in recital. But even among that company of antagonists in politics and principle he won sympathy and interest as well as full belief that the events disclosed had been exactly what he said of them. When he had finished, all the guests gathered around, thanking him for a vividly interesting chapter of history; Mrs. Stowe, in particular, expressing herself as profoundly impressed by what she had heard - a new light thrown upon things misunderstood before.

Of this story it must suffice for me to give here the leading incidents without detail or comment. After an intolerably slow journey by interrupted trains, Mr. Harrison succeeded in establishing Mrs. Davis and her party at Charlotte, where, on Wednesday the 4th of April, he received a telegram from President Davis at Danville merely announcing that he was there. This was their first news of the evacuation of Richmond on April 2.

Directly after Mr. Harrison joined his chief at Danville, the President received the announcement of the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, and immediately gave his secretary orders for the withdrawal of their party, the staff, cabinet officers and others of the government, then at Danville, into North Carolina. A train secured by Mr. Harrison and soon crowded by depressed officials, their families and hangers on, was enlivened when en route by an explosion resulting from a young

Page 222 officer of the Ordnance Bureau seating himself rather hard on the flat top of a stove, the detonation caused by some torpedo appliance carried in his coat-tail pocket!

At Greensboro, North Carolina, there was a halt for consultation with General Joseph E. Johnston, whose army was then confronting Sherman. A conference was held including the President, General Johnston, General Breckinridge (Secretary of War), General Beauregard, Mr. Benjamin (Secretary of State), Mr. Mallory (Secretary of the Navy), Mr. Reagan (Postmaster-General), and others, in the temporary rooms of Colonel John Taylor Wood, of the President’s staff. On the next day the retiring government moved southward, the President, his staff, and some members of the cabinet riding their own horses. Mr. Benjamin, declaring that he should not mount a horse until forced to do so, General Samuel Cooper (adjutant-general and ranking officer of the whole army), no longer a young man; Mr. George Davis, the Attorney-General, and Mr. Benjamin’s brother-in-law, Mr. de Saint Martin, brought up the rear of the column in an ambulance. Once, riding back in search of this distinguished contingent, Mr. Harrison found the whole party stalled in a hopeless mud-hole in the darkness.

“I could see from afar the occasional bright glow of Benjamin’s cigar. While the others of the party were perfectly silent, Benjamin’s silvery voice was presently heard as he rhythmically intoned for their comfort verse after verse of Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington.’”

That Mr. Benjamin could ride as well as another, was afterwards proved on this expedition, when he ultimately left the party and set out alone for the sea-coast,

Page 223 making his way to England via Bermuda. “So long as he remained with us his cheery good-humor and readiness to adapt himself to the requirements of all emergencies made him a most agreeable comrade.” At Yale College when a boy; at the bar in New Orleans; in the Senate of the United States from Louisiana; at first Attorney-General, then Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State of the Confederate States at Richmond, this gentleman became Queen’s Counsel at the London bar and had high honors bestowed on him by the bench and bar of the United Kingdom.

“During all this march,” wrote Mr. Harrison, “Mr. Davis was singularly equable and cheerful. He seemed to have had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of responsibilities, and his conversation was very bright and agreeable. He talked of men and of books, particularly of Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of the woods and the fields; of roads and how to make them; of the habits of birds and of a variety of other topics. His familiarity with and correct taste in the English literature of the last generation, his varied experiences in life, his habits of close observation, and his extraordinary memory made him a charming companion when disposed to talk. Indeed, like Mark Tapley, we were all in good spirits under adverse circumstances, and I particularly remember the entertaining conversation of Mr. Mallory, the Secretary of the Navy” (which does not agree with the item I recently found in an old letter of Major Walton’s to Mr. Harrison, in which this secretary is styled “Mr. Malheureux “).

At Charlotte it was found that Mrs. Davis and her party had left the day before to go further South. As the Presidential party entered a house with difficulty

Page 224 obtained for them (all the inhabitants fearing a threat made by Stoneman’s troopers to burn every house giving refuge to Jefferson Davis), the President received by carrier from General Breckinridge the news of President Lincoln’s assassination, tidings universally regretted by the staff and following. “Everybody’s remark,” wrote Mr. Harrison, “was that in Lincoln the Southern States had lost their only refuge in their then emergency. There was no expression other than that of surprise and regret. As yet we knew none of the particulars of the crime.”

During the speech made at this juncture by Mr. Davis to a column of General Basil Duke’s cavalry, Mr. Harrison stood close to the speaker and heard distinctly every word uttered by him. There was no reference whatever to the assassination and no other speech was made. Mr. Davis’s remark to Colonel William Preston Johnston in Mr. Bates’s house, later on, was that “Mr. Lincoln would have been much more useful to the Southern States than Andrew Johnson, his successor, was likely to be”; “I myself,” said Mr. Harrison, “heard Mr. Davis express the same opinion at that period.”

So much for the oft-quoted charge against Mr. Davis that he had on this occasion spoken approvingly of the horrible crime committed by Booth in the name of the conquered South! My husband often told me that of such a spirit, much less an expression, Mr. Davis could never have been guilty.

“No man ever participated,” he went on to say, “in a great war of revolution with less of disturbance of the nicest sense of perfect rectitude in conduct or opinion; his every utterance, act, and sentiment was with the strictest regard for all the moralities, throughout that

Page 225 troubled time when the passions of many people made them reckless or defiant of the opinions of mankind. His cheerfulness continued in Charlotte and I remember his there saying to me, “I cannot feel like a beaten man.’”

At Charlotte, Mr. Davis’s anxiety about his wife and family led him to despatch his secretary to Abbeville, South Carolina, in search of them, using his own judgment as to what to do after he met them; the President himself proposing to go as rapidly as possible to the Trans-Mississippi Department to join the army under Kirby Smith.

At Abbeville, Mr. Harrison found Mrs. Davis and her party comfortably installed as the guests of Colonel Burt. Mrs. Davis insisted upon at once seeking the sea-coast with a view to sailing for Europe. Had she remained where she was, yielding to the entreaties of all around her, the capture of Jefferson Davis might never have been a chapter of contemporaneous history.

Mr. Harrison’s party, re-enforced by two gallant volunteers, artillerymen of the Southern army, Captain Moody and Major Victor Maurin, proceeded in wagons, toilsomely southward; the men watching at night while the women and children slept, to guard against the theft of their wagons and horses by roving freebooters of whom the woods were full.

At midnight, several days later, Mr. Harrison, who with two teamsters (old soldiers) constituted the picket-guard, heard the soft tread of horses approaching their camp on the sandy road. Harrison challenged and to his astonishment was answered by the President’s voice. Mr. Davis was attended by Colonel William Preston Johnston, Colonel John Taylor Wood, Colonel Frank R. Lubbock, Mr. Reagan, Colonel Thorburn, and Robert, the President’s negro servant.

Page 226

This unexpected encounter kept the President with his family for some days, when, in compliance with the earnest solicitation of the staff, he consented to leave them and go on unhampered by a wagon train. At the village of Abbeville, South Carolina, he was overtaken by a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning, with torrents of rain, and, fearing for the safety of his family camping out at night, again rode after them, to the discomfiture of the party, joining Mrs. Davis in camp near the little hamlet of Irwinsville in Georgia. Here, after promising his friends that he would leave Mrs. Davis’s party, finally, in the morning, Mr. Davis retired to rest in the tent occupied by his wife. Mr. Harrison, overcome by fever and dysentery contracted on the journey, threw himself on the ground not far away and fell into profound sleep, from which he was awakened at daybreak by Jones, Mrs. Davis’s coachman, running to him saying the enemy was upon them.

“I sprang to my feet and in an instant a rattling fire of musketry began on the north side of the creek. Almost at the same moment Colonel Pritchard and his regiment charged up the road from the south upon us… . We were taken by surprise and not one of us exchanged a shot with the enemy. Colonel Johnston tells me he was the first prisoner taken. In a moment Colonel Pritchard rode directly to me and, pointing across the creek, said: ‘What does that mean? Have you any men with you?’ Supposing the firing was done by our teamsters, I said: ‘Of course we have. Don’t you hear the firing?’ He seemed to be nettled at the reply, gave the order ‘Charge,’ and boldly led the way across the creek, nearly every man in his command following. Our camp was thus left deserted for a few minutes, except by one mounted soldier near Mrs. Davis’s tent

Page 227 (afterward said to have been stationed there by Colonel Pritchard in passing), and by the few troopers who stopped to plunder our wagons. I had been sleeping on the same side of the road with the tent occupied by Mrs. Davis, and was then standing very near it. I saw her come out and say something to the soldier mentioned. Perceiving she wanted him to move off, I approached and actually persuaded the fellow to ride away. As the soldier moved into the road and I walked beside his horse, the President emerged for the first time from the tent at the side farther from us, and walked away into the woods to the eastward, at right angles from the road.

“Presently, looking around and observing somebody had come out of the tent, the soldier turned his horse’s head and, reaching the spot he had first occupied, was again approached by Mrs. Davis, who engaged him in conversation. This trooper was joined by perhaps two of his comrades…. They remained on horseback and soon became violent in their language with Mrs. Davis. The order to ‘Halt!’ was called out by one of them to the President. It was not obeyed, and was quickly repeated in a loud voice several times. At least one of the men then threatened to fire, and pointed a carbine at the President. Mrs. Davis, overcome with terror, cried out in apprehension, and the President (who had now walked sixty or eighty paces away into the unobstructed woods), turned around and came rapidly back to his wife near the tent. As the President reproached the soldier who was using rough language to his wife, one of the others, recognizing him, called out: ‘Mr. Davis, surrender! I recognize you, sir!’

“While these things were happening, Miss Howell and the children remained within the other tent….

Page 228 I have not found that there was any one, excepting Mrs. Davis, the single trooper by her tent, and myself, who saw all that occurred and heard all that was said at the time. Any one else who gives an account of it has had to rely upon hearsay, or his own imagination, for this story….

“The business of plundering commenced immediately after the capture; we were soon left with only what we had on and what we had in our pockets…. While this was going on, I emptied the contents of my haversack into a fire where some of the enemy were cooking breakfast, and there saw the papers burn. They were chiefly love-letters, with a photograph of my sweetheart.”

The prisoners en route for Macon were allowed to ride their own horses (promptly seized by their captors when four days later they reached the railway station in that town), whence they were taken by train to Augusta, on their way to Fortress Monroe.

What concerns Jefferson Davis in his subsequent terrible imprisonment at Fortress Monroe, belongs to history.

The experience of Burton Harrison as a prisoner of war was detailed to me by him in 1904, to refresh my memory, during his last illness at our temporary home in Washington, where we had gone to pass the winter near our sons. While there was never any bitterness about it in his speech, or in his manly soul, I could not, even after that lapse of years, hear the recital without a pang of deep pain for what he had needlessly suffered.

Whilst between him and the friends he had left in Richmond a black veil of silence and sickening uncertainty as to his ultimate fate had fallen, he had been confined at first in a room of the Old Capitol Prison. A

Page 229 few days later he was taken by a detective from this place and conducted to a room in the same building, under pretext of being introduced to a Confederate “lady” he might “like to know.” Feeling instinctively that mischief threatened, he had no difficulty in keeping himself in check when in the presence of an “old untidy woman with a shifty eye,” afterward identified as a spy for both sides, who, with every assurance of cordiality for the South, sought to lead him into conversation about Mr. Davis and Confederate matters in general. She did not name the young girl suffering from a bad headache, who, deadly pale, with a white bandage around her brow, struck him as resembling some face on a Roman coin. In honeyed tones the spy woman sought to induce both of them to join in her strictures against the Government and expressions of sympathy for the conspirators. In a flash he divined the poor girl had been brought there for the same purpose as himself. It was designed that they should talk unguardedly in the presence of authority. It was not until the interview - futile as to results - was over that he chanced to hear the detective call the young woman “Miss Surratt.” He came away from this hateful interview feeling he had escaped a trap. After the disgust of it, his prison with the rough jailers seemed a welcome haven.

Next day all the rebel prisoners at the Old Capitol were allowed to crowd to the barred windows to witness Sherman’s imperial progress of return to Washington.

To eyes long used to faded gray and rusty accoutrements, the vast array of blazing sheen and color seemed oppressive. But all the same, he said, the Johnny Rebs enjoyed the show hugely, not begrudging professional praise to military details and ensemble.

Turning away from his window, he felt a touch upon

Page 230 his shoulder from a detective he had not before seen, who curtly told him he was to go to “another place.” His prison comrades, surrounding him with handshakes and kind words, watched him depart sadly. The rumor had got abroad that Jefferson Davis’s secretary and confidential friend was to be dealt with to the full rigor of the law.

A drive in an ambulance - in wartime serving for all purposes of transfer - brought him to the United States Arsenal, situated upon a peninsula running out from the marshy borders of the eastern end of the Potomac, now the site of the War College. It then contained, close to the water’s edge, a group of brick buildings amid level military plazas, banked with pyramids of shells and balls, surrounded by cannon, their carriages and caissons. Behind a high wall towered conspicuously a sombre building with barred and grated windows. Old Washington knew this as a District Penitentiary. It was now transformed into a military and political prison where, in the inner cells, were confined the prisoners implicated in the murder of President Lincoln. In the upper story was sitting a Military Commission whose proceedings filled the world with awesome interest.

On every one of these piping days of early summer the conspirators were brought in irons through a massive nail-studded door communicating with the cells and placed in a line punctuated with armed guards, to sit in the courtroom facing their judges and a mixed audience, till, at the end of the day’s session, they were returned to their dungeons.

The ambulance containing the new prisoner and his guard was several times put out of line before the arsenal door by carriage loads of fine people, the women

Page 231 dressed as if for a race day. One after the other of these gay parties passed in, laughing and chatting, under a grim wall atop of which patrols, ten feet apart, kept always on the lookout. It had become a modish thing for society to drop in for a peep at the conspirators’ trial. Passes, limited to the capacity of the courtroom, were in demand, like opera tickets to a special performance.

The prisoner’s last glimpse for many a day of the outer world was of a broad dusty avenue with shabby fringes of negro cabins and booths leading up to the entrance gate that looked like a country fair. Cattle with lolling tongues were there, disgruntled pigs, and mangy dogs getting in the way of marching soldiers and fashionable vehicles. To the left he saw a military encampment filling a sun-baked plain where, under shelter tents, soldiers off duty lounged, dozed, played cards, or tossed quoits. In the background of the prison two gunboats kept unceasing watch upon the river front.

The prisoner was hurried through the door, marched up two flights of steps, and, without warning, ushered before the gaze of the crowded courtroom, gaping for new sensations, there to stand awaiting the Provost Marshal General to whom he was consigned.

Without moving, he faced the ordeal, his lips set, hot anger coursing through his veins. Spite of his sense of unnecessary degradation, he noted and remembered well the make-up of the scene - the Judge Advocate General, Holt, presiding, with his swart cold face, boding ill for a prisoner falling under his displeasure; his assistants, the judges of the military commission, unfortunately for themselves appointed to conduct this trial; the reporters of the commission; the large whispering, smiling audience; and the accused, seven men

Page 232 and one woman shackled together, almost inevitably doomed to death.

When relieved from his unpleasant position by the arrival of the functionary who was to take official possession of his body, he was again led out of the courtroom, through a jostling vulgar crowd, affecting to shrink away on either side of him as if from a monster ill-secured. The general, having annexed a formidable key, led the way, the prisoner followed by the guard brought up the rear, a band of vagabond loungers shuffling after them until turned back at the entrance to a ponderous grated door.

Life stood still for him a long time thereafter, while he alternately lay or sat upon a blanket on the cemented floor of a felon’s cell, four feet by eight, dark as night in daytime. During five long weeks he was forbidden speech with any one whomsoever. But in those days and nights, when he threw himself down upon the blanket, or else walked, or used gymnastic exercises to stretch his muscles and save his reason, he might have said what a virile poet wrote long afterward: “I am the Master of my Fate. I am the Captain of my Soul.”

He said what he minded most was the eye of a bayonetted soldier, perpetually looking through the grating in his door.

Of whatever his enemies might have accused him, it was not a failure in stoic endurance of his lot. One of his jailers at Fort Delaware told me afterward that of the many thousands they had held, no Confederate prisoner had borne himself with higher courage and cooler pluck. But that experience of the dark cell came near to permanent weakening of his strong physique. When they heard him singing and laughing to himself

Page 233 one day, the guards made haste to summon surgeon and provost marshal, believing he had gone mad.

The surgeon finding his prisoner a wreck in physical strength, the matter was reported to the War Department, after which he was given leave to take daily exercise in the prison yard below. From this glimpse of the world of the living, such as it was, the return to solitary darkness became more and more exhausting to nerve and body. His good doctor again reporting his condition, he was then transferred to a cell facing the Capitol, through which plentiful summer sunlight sifted in, and he could see afar the glitter of the golden dome. A chair allowed him, his next demand was for a copy of Horace or Tennyson, for which the doctor substituted Louis Napoleon’s “Life of Cזsar,” with a promise of more literature to follow.

Under these changed conditions the prisoner’s health improved daily. Although no one spoke to him of daily happenings, his intuition kept him actually abreast of the grim tragedy enacting under the roof that sheltered him. He said he felt like a savage trained to notice the dropping of a nut or the crackle of a twig. Of the unhappy beings on trial he knew nothing, nor had he any sentimental desire that they should escape justice. Once, walking in the prison yard, he had seen at a window the wan face of the girl met in the spy’s company at the Old Capitol - now the most crushed and sorrow-stricken creature that ever met his gaze.

In the yard, also, he once picked up and secreted a bit of greasy newspaper blown from some sentry’s lunch. From this he saw that the conspirators were hastening to their doom.

When, one day, the guards failed to come for him to walk, and from the yard below arose a great clamor of

Page 234 saws and hammering, he surmised what was to be. Every night before he had heard coming through the ventilating tube the melancholy whistling of an occupant of the cell beneath his, evidently absent in the day; for which sound he had learned to listen with an odd sense of companionship. That evening the whistle began - but was halted suddenly and the listener thought the effort was beyond the power of a condemned man probably on the eve of execution.

That night also he heard a new sound - a ship’s bell striking the watches, close by.

“Some of them are to be transported, and that boat is here to take them off,” flashed through his mind.

At dawn he turned in his blanket, wakened by the noise of renewed hammering. From his window he could see many troops massing in Pennsylvania Avenue, and amid them, riding alone, the Catholic priest - Father Walter, the intrepid soldier of Christ (who, because of his belief in the innocence of one of the condemned, was forbidden to go with her to the scaffold) - coming to shrive departing souls.

The officer detailed as usual to watch him at his breakfast, generally so genial, to-day avoided meeting the prisoner’s eye, as did the soldier always holding a musket before his door. He asked no questions, ate his food, and sat afterward for hours without stirring from his chair.

Thenceforward, every sound in the prison came unnaturally distinct. On all sides he heard the incessant tramp of gathering soldiers. On the roof facing the arsenal he saw gazers assembled, and could not look at them.

He heard cell doors opening below, and their occupants led out into the corridor; heard the sobbing

Page 235 of anguished women whose feet kept hurried pace a little while with the others, then turned back heavily.

And lastly a hush, an awful calm, while the lives of a woman and three men were taken from them upon the scaffold.

At his usual hour that evening the guards came to lead him out for exercise. Stepping from the prison door upon the pavement of the courtyard, he saw the scaffold looming black, exactly across a path he had made in the weedy grass, called by the soldiers “Harrison’s beat.” And there, lying across the path, were four new made graves … “like beads upon a string,” he said, over and over to himself, “like beads upon a string.”

The guards and bystanders watching curiously for evidence of his emotion were not gratified. Giving no sign, he began making for himself a new path parallel with the former one.

That night he heard the sound of a faint, tremulous, dejected whistle coming up the ventilating tube, and actually laughed aloud, so glad he was to think the poor devil had not been hanged. When the ship’s bells ceased to strike he was sure it had carried his whistling friend away!

All these things were told to and written down by me, a short time before my husband’s death in 1904 - calmly, without resentment or animus of any kind. He also said that Major –, a Dane from Michigan, who shortly after this transferred him to Fort Delaware, told him during the journey that he had been in personal charge of Mrs. Surratt in prison, had put the black cap over her head and the rope around her neck, launching her into eternity. He said Mrs. Surratt had nothing to do with the plot to kill Lincoln - that she was party to a

Page 236 scheme to capture him only, and that she died an innocent woman. (See General Butler’s charge to Judge Bingham in the House of Representatives that he had hanged an innocent woman!)

Major – also told Mr. Harrison that before sentence of death was passed upon Mrs. Surratt her daughter had tried continually, but in vain, to gain access to her cell. After she was condemned the girl was allowed to meet her mother. Major – was present at the interview and said he never saw such an exhibition of character. As the girl came into the cell she could not stand but fell upon the floor, creeping over it, weeping bitterly, till she reached her mother’s feet and kissed them, with a thousand loving, imploring words of tenderness. The mother remaining cold as a stone, his heart filled with wrath against her hardness to her child, but, when Miss Surratt finally went out of the cell, the woman broke down in such an awful passion of tears as he prayed he might never see again, melting him utterly into sympathy with her.

Burton Harrison was personally on good terms with his jailers. When Major – was conducting him, with two guards, to Fort Delaware, they were halted in the station at Philadelphia because of the failure of a carriage expected to take them to the boat wharf. In some perplexity the major said he would go himself and look for it. “And in the meantime, colonel,” he added seriously, “will you have an eye upon these fellows of mine, and see that they don’t leave you?”

With General Hartranft also, the provost marshal who had locked him in the black cell at the arsenal and came every day with the surgeon to see if the prisoner kept his health and sanity, Mr. Harrison had kind relations.

Page 237

In after years, when as counsel for the Union Telegraph Company, my husband went to conduct some business for them at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he found the official he had to consult professionally was none other than his former jailer. When Mr. Harrison came downstairs in the morning at the Lochiel Hotel and saw Hartranft waiting for him in the hall, he threw up his hands, exclaiming, “My God, general, you are not after me again?”

They shook hands and the general answered: “I tell you, Harrison; you haven’t a better friend than I am in the world. Come to breakfast and, after we’ve finished business, we’ll spend the day together.”

Before ending this grim chapter, one of the horrible sequelז of the Civil War, I will say that after hearing these stories told again in Washington in 1904, I desired to drive with my husband to the scene of his old ordeal, where the present War College buildings were then going up on the site of the old prison of the arsenal.

Sitting in a victoria, he directed the coachman as well as he could where to go, but became soon confused about localities in the altered aspect of the place. We pulled up, and I addressed the “boss” of a gang of workmen, asking if he could tell me where we were.

“Why, ma’am, don’t you know?” he answered. “This is the place where the scaffold stood on which Mrs. Surratt and the other conspirators were hanged.”

My husband made no comment, nor did I, and silently we drove homeward.

Page 238 CHAPTER XI

IT was thought best for us ex-Confederates of both sexes to keep quietly out of public observation while still the wave of feeling (enormously increased by the assassination of Lincoln) dashed high over our reunion with Northern friends.

Our cousin, the Rev. Herbert Norris, rector of the Episcopal Church at Woodbury, New Jersey, who had lost a noble son in the Union service at Antietam, was good enough to ask that I should be sent to remain under his protection, and that of his wife, one of the Rawle family of Philadelphia, intensely in sympathy with the triumphing cause.

They were more than kind to their poor little storm-tossed, rebel visitor, carrying in her young heart a world of painful experience together with certain fears and sad yearnings of which she could speak to nobody. It was as if an iron door had closed between her and the one who had gone out of her life so unsuspectingly that day of March on the eve of the Occupation! Not a word had come from him, and she only knew he was treated as a “dangerous” prisoner.

The first thing Mrs. Norris wisely judged to be a healthy restorative for girlish spirits, was for me to overhaul my Confederate wardrobe and spend the check my mother had given me for new clothes. I went into Philadelphia escorted by my cousin Herbert, who took me to all the necessary shops, and stood by patiently till my ardor was appeased. I cannot now imagine anything

Page 239 much uglier than the gored ruffled skirts stretched over wide hoops, the short bolero jackets, and insignificant little round hats shelved forward upon our brows. But when they came home and were compared with the threadbare, faded made-overs of my Richmond supply, I felt richer than a queen! These exhilarations did not last long, and many a night I sobbed for bygones and for friends who felt with me. The great city of Philadelphia as I saw it on our visits seemed so untouched by the war - casual people were so prosperous, so indifferent, except to say bitter, biting things against the Southern cause. If I had been wiser I should have realized that the North, too, was riddled with painful remembrances and sorrows of the war.

My next visit was one of some length to my father’s sister, at old Morrisania. She had lent a son to the Union army and, with her girls, was in mourning for President Lincoln when I arrived. My uncle, an original member of the Republican party (having been, like my father, an old-line Whig of ardent enthusiasm), was strongly opposed to the Southern idea of secession, and for the Confederacy and its leaders had no tolerance or consideration. While a man of large generosities and kind impulse, he was violent in invective against the rebels and all their works. At table and elsewhere it was the constant effort of the family, who had received me with open arms and cemented a friendship lasting all our lives, to restrain him from jocular remarks of triumph over the conquered South that swelled my heart to bursting, unable as I was to retort or give expression to my sufferings. One day at luncheon, when he quoted the verse about “hanging Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree,” I for a while “saw red,” and came very near leaving the house on foot and taking refuge I knew not

Page 240 where. Afterward, on learning from his wife how he had pained me, he was as sorry as I could have wished. I could not understand why some of their country neighbors, calling at Morrisania, looked at me curiously as at a brand snatched from the burning. This dear house was to become a second home to me, I to assume the position of elder daughter to my aunt who had been my father’s favorite sister, and in the course of time I was to go out from under its hospitable portal as a bride.

The ease and luxury of my surroundings, in startling contrast to the life so recently led in Richmond, would have been better appreciated had I known what was befalling my prisoner at Fort Delaware. My girl cousins, full of sympathy in the case, had already become warm advocates of the unseen private secretary of the late Confederate President. There was a universal thrill of satisfaction in the family when, at last, one day in August, I received from him a long full letter.

The way in which it came to me was never revealed until by a letter written in 1876 by that preux chevalier, Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, of Hagerstown, Maryland, after reading a Virginian paper I had published in Scribner’s Magazine. This letter tells, better than I can, the conditions under which my prisoner was passing his days.

“In August, 1865, I was a prisoner in Fort Delaware, sent there by the sentence of a military commission. My imprisonment was not a harsh one, and what with the courtesy of the commanding officer, and free access to a well-filled library and the liberty of the island, my time passed easily if not rapidly.

“But up in a keep among the battlements, strictly guarded and confined, with no privileges and no companionship of men and books, in solitary imprisonment,

Page 241 Colonel Harrison passed a longer servitude, wearily and impatiently. He was suffering vicariously for the alleged treason of his chief. Morning and evening he took his unsatisfactory exercise along the battlements. We were forbidden to speak to, or recognize each other, and yet there was no prison rule which could prevent the unspoken salute of the raised hat, although with averted faces. Even the keepers and jailers of that fort, used as they had become to many senseless tyrannies during the war, were disgusted with the strict and hard imprisonment of Colonel Harrison, and the men on duty freely expressed their opinion of it. The day before I was released, a stalwart, open-faced, coatless soldier came into my room. After telling me that he cooked for and waited on Colonel Harrison, he began to deplore the stringency of his confinement, especially the order that forbade him to write to, or receive letters from, his family and friends; and most especially, with hot wrath and an oath, did he think it was a shame the prisoner couldn’t even write to the young lady he was in love with! (How he obtained this information I do not know.) He then said that ‘one way or another’ Colonel Harrison had got hold of pen and ink and paper, and had written a number of letters he wanted to send out to his family; would I take charge of them? A flash of suspicion on my part was dispelled by a look into his honest face… . The next day he strolled again into my quarters and after expressing his satisfaction at my release, and his regret that Colonel Harrison was not freed, wandered about the room a bit, then said good-by and walked out. Upon taking down my coat which hung against the wall, I found therein a solid pack of letters. That day General Schoeff took me to Wilmington in his boat; that evening the letters were delivered to Mrs. Cary

Page 242 in Baltimore. I think the fullest letter there was addressed to - whom? She must have received and evidently appreciated it. Does she remember it?”

Other letters followed. A vegetable seller became the messenger of Cupid, and carried more than one out of the fort in hollowed carrots and cucumbers. We, in return, contrived to get letters back addressed to a certain “Tony Hardiman,” care of a certain somebody else, at a certain post-office, which shall be forever nameless. We knew, now, that things had otherwise improved for the prisoner, that books from the post library heaped his table, and a friendship had sprung up between himself and the brave commandant of the fort, ending in walks on the island and visits to the general’s home.

These things inspired in me hope that a pleasure even greater might be given to the captive. With my mother, I returned in the autumn to Woodbury, New Jersey, where, with the aid of my young cousin, Dr. Herbert Norris, we three made an attack in person upon the fort.

Our ways of getting there were devious and thorny. From a village on the opposite shore of the Delaware River, we sailed in a leaky fishing boat across a swelling, roughening tide. Arrived at the moated fortress on the bank, we sent in our cards by a soldier to the commandant. To our delight, no question was made about receiving us and, crossing a bridge to enter gloomy corridors, we were soon in the presence of the redoubted chief. Had I divined that the general’s kind heart was already enlisted for the prisoner, not only through his own pleasure in his society, but because of his family’s warm liking and championship - had I supposed that in after years these dear people were to name a son “Burton Harrison,” and to bid their other sons try to

Page 243 model themselves upon one whom they conceived to be “a perfect gentleman” - then I should not have been so faint-hearted.

The general, maintaining a severe official aspect, looked us over, and enquired of Mrs. Cary whether we were perchance the mother and sister of Colonel Harrison.

“No,” said my mother; “only friends.”

“I understand!” said the general, hemming and hawing greatly. A moment more and he had taken the parcel my mother handed to him - a miniature of myself painted by Mrs. Thompson in New York, to replace the one burnt up in the soldier’s camp-fire in the Georgia wilderness - and the open letter sent with it, and despatched them by an orderly to the prisoner.

And then, a sudden, even kinder, impulse overcoming him, he asked my mother if she could trust him to show me the interior of the fortress. He led, I followed, to a door opening on the inner court, where, bidden to look up toward the battlements, I saw my prisoner, standing indeed between bayonets in a casemate, but alive and well, waving his hat like a schoolboy, and uttering a great irrepressible shout of joy!

These are the things that remain green in memory when the landscape of life is elsewhere dry and sere! But for the courage and devotion of my dear mother and my cousin, in accompanying me on what seemed a forlorn hope, we should never have won the day!

The next winter we had a house in Washington, principally for the purpose of winning the prisoner’s release. Through the tireless efforts with President Johnson of our dear old friend, Hon. Francis Preston Blair, this was finally accomplished. On the 16th of January, 1866, Burton Harrison was freed from Fort Delaware,

Page 244 coming at once to visit us in Washington, on his way to rejoin his mother and sister in the South. Having spent the latter months of his imprisonment in studying law, through the aid of books furnished him by his old friends and Yale chums, Eugene Schuyler and S. D. Page, of Philadelphia, he, after journeys to Canada and to Europe, was admitted to the New York bar. By advice of Mr. Charles O’Conor, his first friend and advisor, then the leading lawyer of New York, he entered the law office of ex-Judge Fullerton, and shortly after began practice for himself, which continued during many years of busy and successful experience.

In October, 1866, my mother and I sailed in the ship Arago for Havre, the passenger list made up of many New Yorkers known to each other, including the family of the new American minister to the Court of Napoleon III, General Dix. Other people we knew on board were Mr. Martin Zborowski, of New York - whose wife had been a Morris - with his sons, John, or “Laddie,” and Elliot, and his young daughter Anna, now the Countess de Montsaulnin, of Paris. A young Southern widow, Mrs. Hewitt, formerly Miss Belle Key, of Mississippi (sister-in- law of Mrs. Walker Fearn), was taking a little blonde daughter, Marie Hewitt, subsequently the handsome Mme. Wilkinson, of Paris, to be put at Mme. Grenfell’s school in Paris. It was hardly a surprise to us when some months later we were bidden to the marriage of Mr. Zborowski with Mrs. Hewitt. Afterward we saw much of their conjoined families abroad and in Westchester County where Mr. Zborowski had a charming home. Several young couples on their bridal tours (who have strangely managed to become old couples by now) bore names familiar to New York

Page 245 society. Everybody on board was nice to us recent enemies of the republic, and we contracted more than one friendship of an enduring nature.

As our winter in Paris was avowedly for the purpose of giving my education the “finishing” touches sadly omitted in war experience, I was forthwith started in lessons of various kinds, including a training of the voice by M. Archaimbaud, of the Paris Conservatoire. To meet exigencies of foreign opinion, I was transformed back into the conventional jeune fille, accompanied everywhere by my mother. I often wondered what my testy little maמtre de chant would think if I told him I had sung war songs to marching troops, or played accompaniments for a chorus of soldiers surrounding me at the piano? I believe he would have fainted, then and there!

Archaimbaud took interest in my voice and inspired me with delight in his methods. By and by we removed from the Hotel de Lille et d’Albion to a quaintly attractive domicile where some New Orleans creole friends, had advised my mother to go for the betterment of my French accent. This was “La Ville au Bois,” a villa boarding and apartment house, at the Porte Maillot in Neuilly, as pretty a place as could be, with ivy-grown buildings surrounding a paved courtyard, where in fine weather the tables for meals were set out of doors under the shade of great old trees. A high brick wall, overhung with creepers, divided us from the Bois de Boulogne. There, in a small but daintily furnished rez de chaussיe, consisting of two bedrooms and a sitting-room, the latter upholstered in a warm crimson moreen stuff, opening upon a wee garden of our own, we spent the winter. We grew so attached to our French home that when, during the Franco-Prussian war, we heard it had been destroyed by shot and shell - the second abode

Page 246 of mine laid low through war’s necessities - we were genuinely grieved.

Until then, I had not believed there were so many bright-eyed, smiling, chattering old people in the world as among our comrades at Ville au Bois! The mystery was explained when on Sundays, younger men and women, with children carrying bouquets, came reverently to call upon their seniors, most often leading them off in their best caps and redingotes, to dine en ville with their offspring. The Ville au Bois, generally, was dying to understand about “ces dames de l’Amיrique du Sud,” who had taken the rez de chaussיe apartment. Upon my mother, who had a beautiful clear olive complexion with large dark eyes, they looked with some comprehension, but continued to ask her if Mademoiselle were not remarkably fair for a denizen of her country.

Old Mme. Letellier, Alexandre Dumas’s sister, who had an apartment all rosy chintz and growing plants, showed me a lock of their “sainted father’s” hair (we called it wool in our part of the world), asking me if that was not like the hair of our people, generally. She pointed with pride to the deep tinting of blood underneath her finger nails, and said: “I, too, am of your race, mademoiselle.” To all of them, to be of the South meant to be off color in complexion!

She was a dear little old person, who lent me books, gave me one of the great Alexandre’s MS. and petted me extravagantly. She adored her nephew, Dumas fils, whose “Les Idיes de Mme. Aubray” had just made its success at the Gymnase Theatre, and showed me the photograph of her famous brother sitting with Adah Isaacs Menken on his knee, saying, indulgently, “He was always an imprudent boy, ce bon gros Alexandre.”

Page 247

One old lady had on her wall a picture, swathed in crape, of her son, in French soldier’s uniform, who had been shot following Maximilian in Mexico. Underneath it was a vase that always held fresh flowers.

We heard a glorious midnight mass at Christmas at the Madeleine, with a baritone from the opera singing Adolphe Adam’s “Noכl.” Then came the joyous New Year’s day, and on Twelfth Night they had a regular bourgeois “Dמner des Rois” at our establishment, to which we were formally invited. A flower bed, over which butterflies and humming-birds quivered, seemed the array of caps for this occasion; and even the untidy, snuff-taking old gentleman who distracted me by making queer noises in his throat, was shaved and brushed, wearing a white waistcoat and new skull cap with the inevitable red button of the Legion d’Honneur on his breast. He ultimately won the bean constituting him king of the revels, our landlady’s baby granddaughter, a charming imp of five, getting the other bean that made her queen. Hand-in-hand, their majesties circulated around the tables, clinking glasses with every one, and - to my horror, as I saw them coming nearer to “ces dames” - kissing as they went! Upon my hand, luckily, the king, after a moment’s hesitation, bestowed a moist salute, but my poor mother received hers upon her brow. I was glad to compromise by giving little Marie a hearty hug and kiss.

From La Ville au Bois we usually walked to the Barriטre de l’Etoile, then took a cab or bus, to view the sights of Paris. The Sainte Chapelle, Musיe de Cluny, and Napoleon’s tomb at the Invalides were my favorites, but eagerly we took it all in. Soon visitors began to appear, old friends from the Confederacy, and some

Page 248 new friends made at the North and on shipboard. Our little red salon, with its “feu d’enfer,” as Jean, our attendant, called our generous fire, opened to some interesting people. Prince Camille de Polignac and M. de St. Martin were very kind in coming, also dear old Mr. Francis Corbin, whose family were hereditary friends of the Fairfaxes.

The ancestor of the Corbins had settled in Virginia about 1650, his son, Gawin Corbin, becoming president of the Council of Virginia. In 1754, George Washington wrote making application to Mr. Corbin to use his influence in the council to procure for him a commission as lieutenant-colonel, which Mr. Corbin answered in the following brief phrase: “DEAR GEORGE:

“I enclose you your commission, God prosper you with it. “Your friend, “RICHARD CORBIN.”

My mother’s great-uncle, it was, who took the son of this gentleman, then a boy, in one of the Fairfax ships from Virginia to England, where the youngster was put to school.

Mr. Francis Corbin invited us to dinner in the old Rohan hפtel in the rue de Grenelle where he had long resided, and we met an agreeable company, French and English, of Southern sympathizers, of whom I remember only Mr. Moncure Robinson, of Philadelphia, a connection of our family.

Once, handsome General Breckinridge called, with Colonel Dudley Mann, late Confederate States commissioner to France, who won our hearts by asking if

Page 249 we were “related to the gallant little Midshipman Cary, who made so many friends when Captain Pegram ran the Nashville into Southampton.” From my Southern album I take an interesting letter from Colonel Dudley Mann to President Davis, which has never before been published. “BRUSSELS, Dec. 17, 1864. “Private. “MY DEAR MR. PRESIDENT.

“The Secretary of State will doubtless communicate to you the suggestion which I made yesterday the subject of a dispatch to him.

“I confidently believe that I can render singularly valuable services to our cause if it shall be agreeable to you to embrace the Germanic Confederation and Holland, in my present mission, in the manner indicated to Mr. Benjamin.

“From the Emperor of the French, we never had nor have now, anything favorable to expect. His Imperial Majesty is deaf to international justice and blind to its usages when he conceives that Mexico may possibly be involved in danger. It is quite certain, as I had long ago supposed, that there is a cordial understanding between the Cabinets of the Tuileries and Washington in relation to Maximilian. I now understand, upon good authority, that the latter is to consider the Monroe Doctrine as utterly obsolete, and that for this concession the former will decline for an indefinite period to establish diplomatic relations with us. This is a monstrous wrong, but one for which unfortunately we have no redress. The hour of retribution, however, may arrive sooner or later.

“Our friends everywhere enjoy your recent speeches and your message. They like your confident and earnest

Page 250 language. Our enemies, too, know that you speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

“I am hopeful that we have seen the darkest days of our struggle. I indulge the belief that we shall experience no more severe disasters. I have never feared but that our independence was established, durably, the day that it was declared.

“With cordial good wishes for your family, I pray you to believe me, “Yours devotedly, “A. DUDLEY MANN. “His EXCELLENCY JEFFERSON DAVIS, “President C. S. A., Richmond, Virginia.”

The Preston girls came from Rue Lord Byron; Mrs. Myers, with her rosy young face, bright eyes, and dark hair powdered with white, and the Amaron Ledoux’s, originally from New Orleans, long resident in Paris, aunt and cousins of Burton Harrison. It was hard to tell which was lovelier in this family - the mother, renowned since her youth for good looks and gracious manners; Alice, who died young; Anina, now the Baronne Brin, of Chateau Beausoliel; or Gabrielle, the present Marquise de Valori.

Ex-Senator and Mrs. Gwin, of California, maintained much of their accustomed elegance in a large apartment where they gave many parties; Dr. and Mrs. Marion Sims, with their handsome daughters, Mrs. Pratt (who appeared at a fancy ball, as an American Indian princess, with great יclat), Carrie, and Florence; and the Slidells, one of whom went to the same ball as “Rain” under a wonderful umbrella dripping with a shower of silver drops, were Southerners much admired in the society of the day. Mr. and Mrs. John Bigelow, to be

Page 251 our good friends and neighbors in Gramercy Park in later years, were just leaving Paris to yield their place to General and Mrs. Dix when we arrived. Mr. Parke Godwin, our future neighbor at Bar Harbor, made the speech of the evening at the farewell banquet given to Mr. Bigelow at the Grand Hotel in December.

Among the New York set two noted young beauties were the Beckwith sisters - a miracle of cream and rose complexions and charming costumes. “Baby” Beckwith was afterward Lady Leigh, of England, her sister becoming Mrs. Thorne. One saw a good deal of the pretty faces of that period, since the Empress had set the fashion of bonnets no bigger than a postage stamp. The newspapers complained that this mode, requiring a great deal more hair than the other, would cost husbands and fathers accordingly, since hair fetched a much higher market price than did silk and artificial flowers.

We went to “le skating,” on a pond in the Bois de Boulogne, where there were coronetted carriages, powdered and plushed footmen, and Tom Thumb grooms waiting on all the grand people of the Tuileries society. There I had my first view of the Empress Eugיnie, skating slowly, holding on to a bגton supported between two gentlemen of her court. She wore a short costume of sapphire blue velvet, trimmed with grטbe, with a toque of the same plumage. I lost my heart to her instantly, such beauty, grace, distinction were hers, and her smile adorable.

Now for some extracts from my diary.

“We hear of a negro actor named Ira Aldridge, who has made his appearance in “Othello” at Versailles, after a grand dinner given to him by theatre people and literati, including Dumas pטre. He is said to play the part superbly, wearing a costume covered with jewels.”

Page 252

“There was a sale of autographs last week, when George Sand’s brought six francs; Seward’s, ten francs; Jefferson Davis’s, fifteen francs; and Verdi’s, three francs, fifty centimes.

“Heard Adelina Patti in ‘Don Pasquale’ at Les Italiens. She doesn’t look a day older than when I saw her, in Washington before the war, as ‘Rosina’ in the ‘Barbiטre,’ a little tripping thing of fifteen or sixteen. Now she is a great diva, making twenty-four thousand pounds in a season at the Italian Opera here. Crowds follow her carriage and wait around her hotel till she comes out on the balcony to throw them flowers. At Marseilles she was jostled until her bonnet fell off and was torn to pieces for souvenirs. Certainly she sings like the lark at Heaven’s gate.

“Saw a ballet called ‘La Source,’ which fairly dazzled my eyes - my first grand ‘spectacle.’ I wondered what they would say to it on Seminary Hill. I accused mamma of shutting her eyes during part of the capering. I also rallied her for saying we had accomplished so much sight-seeing together she did not believe there was a hole or corner of Paris we had left undone! We really do have the most delightful and sympathetic walks and explorings. She is a marvel in remembering history, and is working at her French grammar like a schoolgirl.

“Longstreet Branham called, a charming boy from Mississippi, a friend of Burton Harrison and L. Q. C. Lamar. We walked home from service in the Avenue Marboeuf with the Smith Bryces, our companions on the Arago. They have a pretty new apartment where they asked us to breakfast the other day: only the family present - Clיmence and the two boys, Lloyd and Carroll. The major says he wishes his ladies

Page 253 would go more to the Louvre Gallery and less to the Louvre Magasin.”

“Saw that horrid, vulgar Teresa, the chanteuse of music halls, of whom the fashionable world makes so much. After one of her appearances in a salon of the Faubourg St. Germain, she said quite naןvely: ‘The songs I sing here wouldn’t be tolerated by the police in a music hall.’ The Papal Nuncio and his secretary were invited to hear her at a very distinguished house and incontinently left the premises. Princess Metternich sent her own carriage to fetch her to one of her parties. As a commentary, Teresa’s predecessor, Rigolboche, who set Paris aflame a short time since, died recently and was buried in the fosse commune, or universal ditch where paupers are consigned.

“Had pointed out to me in the Champs Elysיes the Oh!- no-we-never-mention-her - Cora Pearl, with a lap-dog dyed to match her yellow hair. She is a common-looking thing!

“Went to a ball at the Gwins - everything beautifully done. All the best-known ex-Confeds were present, with crowds of foreigners. Mme. Ledoux took me, and introduced many danseurs. Danced with Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and Mesopotamians, who presented themselves clicking their varnished heels together, and murmuring ‘Est ce que j’aurai l’honneur, Mademoiselle?’ after which we circled without a word passing between us, till they brought me back to my chaperon. I could have told them I knew better fun than that. Alice and Anina looked radiant and were the greatest belles. A little slim Montenegrin prince of royal family, named ‘Dieu-Donnי Petrovitch,’ asked me to dance twice, and actually said the room was hot. The cotillon lasted till half-past three. I danced

Page 254 it with the Count de Marnas. I wore blue silk under an embroidered white muslin, made by Lucie Dיcharme. It was cut in Empire fashion with the waist up under the arms and a big blue sash, with a wreath of forget-me-nots in the hair - ‘toilette tout א fait jeune fille, et trטs comme il faut,’ Lucie said, when she brought it home in a cab.

“To-day, the coldest of the winter, mamma and I walked across the Bois de Boulogne in by-ways, under pines and cedars fringed with snow, in a crisp delicious atmosphere, coming out at the cascade where the ivy on the rocks glittered with icicles. Then, on past Longchamps, to Surטsnes, where we hired a voiture to bring us home. How bitter chill it was! All Europe is grumbling at the cold. Birds and beasts everywhere creeping from their retreats in search of food.

“Went to the opera to hear Marie Battu sing in ‘Alceste.’ Archaimbaud insists that I must hear good music constantly - a very nice prescription.

“To-day, through the Ledoux, who know him very well, came from the Duc de Bassano, the Emperor’s Chamberlain, two huge rose-colored cards, admitting us to the Midday Mass at the Tuileries Chapel, at which their Majesties will be present. I had thought I had a dreadful cold, but it got better directly after that. Of course the trouble with my seeing court functions is that my dearest angel of a mother won’t hear of my receiving any favors from the American Minister, although the Dixs have been so good in offering things. She, who is gentleness itself, actually said with a flushed face and flashing eyes, that I should never go inside the Tuileries if it depended on receiving favors from the representative of ‘that Government!’ ‘Besides, only a year ago, he gave the order to shoot anybody who wanted

Page 255 to pull down the Stars and Stripes, and you know, my child, we did.’

“We were introduced into the Chapel by liveried functionaries after waiting in an anteroom till the doors were opened. To-day is the Feast of Candles, or Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the pictures and frescoes and gilding were lit up by a blaze of wax lights, each priest and acolyte also holding one. At twelve, there was a cry in the gallery ‘L’Empereur,’ repeated by a functionary upon the altar steps. Then the priests came in, and into the tribune draped with crimson velvet studded with golden bees, stepped their Majesties. The Empress sat on the Emperor’s left, the Prince Imperial, a nice, manly boy, on his right. She looked like some old ivory carving of a saint. She wore a casaque and toque of marron velvet, with a wreath of black and gold leaves low on her lovely fluffy hair. She seemed pensive, even distressed, her lids drooping, her face resting upon one long slender well-gloved hand. I looked at the Emperor with close attention, as at one whom some consider the master-mind of Europe in these days. His face was grayish in tint, lined with deep marks, his eyes had puffy places under them. While at prayer, he seemed suddenly to break down into an old unhappy man, goaded by unpleasant thoughts, probably of Mexico and his lamentable fiasco there. But then, how can any French Monarch feel settled and happy, living in that great marble palace looking out on the fateful Place de la Concorde?

“While the Emperor and Empress received the sacrament alone, I looked, first at an exquisite painting of an Annunciation” (destroyed in the Commune) “then back at the pale sad face of the Empress. There was music of harp and organ with voices chiming in pianissimo -

Page 256

“We walked home through the Tuileries Garden, where for a penny I bought of a most polite old woman, a bunch of violets that fills the room with perfume as I write. No, I shouldn’t like to be peerless Eugיnie in the Palace of the Tuileries!

“We were asked to a soirיe to be given by an English lady in the Avenue de l’Imperatrice. Her cards read: ‘Tea at eight. Electricity at nine. Music at ten.’

“We got there for the music, furnished mostly by the guests. Mrs. Blanchard Jerrold, daughter of Mark Lemon of Punch, helped to make it. Later on, to my dismay, our hostess descended upon me. She was a large formidable lady like a rocking horse in expression. Somebody had fallen out, and she insisted I should sing in the garden duet from ‘Faust’; with whom but Garvarni, one of the tenors I had heard at the Italian opera? I was cold with fear, but managed to get through my part, my Faust helping enormously with his unerring skill and ease. Archaimbaud was amazed, but secretly pleased when I told him of this next day at my lesson, and that I had also sung ‘Cours mon aiguille,’ from the ‘Noces de Jeannette,’ at which he had kept me working away till I was sick of it. My clever cross little teacher then condescended to say I had rather a nice voice, with some musical feeling, and if I sang ‘exercises’ and ‘vocalises’ for a thousand years or so I might do fairly well.

“Heard ‘Mignon’ at the Opיra Comique, with Galli Marie and Victor Capoul, both exquisite. Then, the treat of all treats, Christine Nilsson as the ‘Queen of Night’ in Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ her ‘vocalises’ like a rain of jewels.” I heard la diva afterward in New York in all her rפles, and regretted to miss her appearance in Thomas’s “Hamlet,” at the Thיatre Lyrique,

Page 257 after I left Paris, when the audiences simply went mad over her. Her farewell in that opera in the spring of 1868 is said to have been the most extraordinary scene of enthusiasm; flowers covering the stage, and thunders of applause that would not die away. I met her frequently at the houses of friends in New York, and find among my autographs a gracious little note from her accepting an invitation to our home. I saw her, as the Countess Miranda, at Monte Carlo, a few years ago, a thin net veil over her face, sitting at the tables absorbingly intent upon her game. All that beauty of complexion, the light of those wide-open eyes, that grace and virginal joyousness were gone. She was quite another person; a grievous disillusion!

“Heard some delicious concerts by Pasdeloup’s orchestra at the Salle l’Athיnיe. Have been in turn to hear all the best artists of the day at the operas, also to the Thיatre Franחais, and to the Chגtelet, for spectacles. All the others are tabooed to a young girl. Went to the Cirque de l’Impיratrice, to see Lיotard jump, or rather fly through the air.” After we left Paris he fell once into the lap of our friend, Count de –, and broke the poor count’s leg, not his own.

“On Feb. 27th, a card arrived for me for the ball at the Tuileries, sent through a Southern friend married into one of the old families of France, who offered to take me with her daughter. We went up the fifty steps of the grand staircase, on each end of which stood like a statue one of the Cent Gardes, the Emperor’s bodyguard, the tallest and handsomest men in the military service of France, wearing the classic helmet with a snowy horse’s tail arched over its crest. I had to own to myself that nothing I had seen at the poor shabby White House ‘befo de wah’ or in the Governor’s house

Page 258 in Richmond, could come up to this! In the gorgeous Salle des Marיchaux, with Strauss playing his best waltzes in the gallery, we saw their Majesties sitting on golden thrones under curtains studded with golden bees. Never since, have I seen the outward form of sovereignty so splendidly assumed.

“The Empress wore white tulle over satin, the skirt bordered by a garland of soft white roses, the bodice a mass of scintillating gems, her hair linked with diamond clasps, around her waist her famous jewelled girdle. My friends pointed out to me all the distinguished people of the hour - Prince Napoleon, his wife, Princess Clotilde, Princess Mathilde, Marquise de Gallifet, Duchesse Tascher de la Pagerie, the diplomats generally, etc. I was most interested in Princess Pauline Metternich, who calls herself ‘the monkey of the court,’ because she dares anything for a moment’s diversion, but is, nevertheless, grande dame to the finger tips. She has recently played three parts of an evening, at theatricals given at Compטigne - a vivandiטre, a cab-man (in complete costume, argot and all!) and then the ‘Spirit of Song’ in white tulle, the skirt decorated with music bars, the bodice one solid mass of diamonds. The wit and tact of this Austrian Embassadress are quoted everywhere. I stood near her at another ball where I could not but overhear her sparkling talk - equalled in glitter only by the high collar of emeralds and diamonds around her slim throat.

“The State Ball at the Tuileries was such a terrible squash, as they say in England, our tulles and laces were simply carried away upon sword hilts. A handsome old officer, asked by a lady pushed upon him in the jam, to kindly take his finger out of her ear, said politely, ‘Mille excuses, Madame, but at present it is impossible.’

Page 259 I had one dance only, with the ‘God-given’ Montenegrin prince, who was not to be resisted as he came to seek me in his stunning national costume, gleaming with color and gold lace; but my feet were fairly trodden out of shape. This Prince Pיtrovitch, with Sir Hubert Jerningham, the handsome young attachי of the British Legation - whom, as a distinguished diplomat, author, and traveller, I was to know in years to come, when I had the pleasure to be his guest at his beautiful Longridge Towers near Berwick-on- Tweed; on which estate are the ruins of Norham Castle, the scene of the opening canto of Scott’s ‘Marmion’ - were often invited by the Empress Eugיnie to lead the cotillons at her private dances.

“We did not wait to taste the imperial supper, but, letting ourselves be put into our wraps by the functionaries in black velvet with silver chains around their necks, got into our carriage and hurried away between huge bonfires built at intervals in the rue de Rivoli, to keep waiting coachmen and footmen warm, to a bal privי in the Boulevard Malesherbes, where I danced in a cotillon till 3 A. M.”

After that, we had more pomps and vanities, of which the foregoing will serve as a sample. But amid all this bedazzlement to ex-Confederate eyes, it is not to be supposed that our hearts swerved from continual remembrance of the dear ones left behind, with whom we were in constant correspondence. Their joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, were ours, and tears often flowed in thinking of them. My mother, indeed, carried the Confederacy written in her heart till death, as Queen Mary once bore Calais.

My mother had by now settled down into a more tranquil state of mind concerning her son, who, like many

Page 260 another young officer of the Confederate States navy after the collapse of our cause, had relieved the intolerable uncertainty of the first days of reconstruction by shipping before the mast in the bark Clifton, sailing from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro. This exploit, a greater ordeal to us than to him, embodied a voyage of fifty days to South America. Being a protיgי of the owner, he at first lived aft in the cabin, but resenting some chaff of the captain when in his cups, he took his tin pot and spoon and went forward into the forecastle with the men, who received him with open arms.

“I was soon at home with the ship, and as active aloft as any, turning out to reef and furl and laying out on the weather topsail yard-arm when the squall was roaring and the sea below us outside the narrow hull churned to froth and spoondrift. We were short-handed, and often and again did our watch get below from off the sloppy decks in nasty weather, and into the steaming forecastle, just in time enough to fall into tired slumber - when bang, bang, bang would come a handspike on the forecastle door, and hoarse voices cry, ‘All hands reef topsails!’

“Out we rolled, struggling into wet sea boots and clinging oilskins, and tumbling half-awake out on the slanting deck, and so with the weather rigging and up that steep path against which the gale would flatten one; the same gale which was roaring aloft and making the lowered sail flat and struggle like a furious wild thing!

“Aloft and quickly with the swarming crowd, and over the fullock shrouds, and away out on the yard-arm, standing on the swaying foot rope and holding fast with tooth and eyelid to the spar, from which the sail we wished to catch and reef, would flap and belly out in its

Page 261 imprisoning bunt and reef-lines. On the yard-arm, the swinging roll of the ship was quick and wide reaching, leaving one at moments poised as a bird in air over the black and tumbling sea, and under a blacker fiercer sky. No shout would reach us against the wind, but a whispered word went back plainly to leeward. Obeying a sign from the 2nd mate in the bunt, all hands reached out and grasped the struggling devilish sail, and with a pull together, which cracked one’s back, and started finger-nails, a little fold was gathered in and held under one’s body, until another skin could be had, and also fastened, and the whole secured by reef points. Then ‘Lay down from aloft,’ was the cry, and back we clambered, the watch stumbling into the forecastle to sleep out what remained of its precious time. The Clifton topsails, I may add, were of the old-fashioned back-breaking sort, rigged with single topsail yards. In early days, the most difficult seamanship was in reefing topsails, and the supreme test of the able seaman was his manner of passing the weather ear-ring, a duty which required him to be first aloft and on the weather yard-arm, which he perched upon, a-straddle, with foot on Flemish horse, and back against the left, ready to make fast the ear-ring at the reef, provided the flattening sail did not flap over his head and drag him from the yard, as happened now and then.”

I have copied this bit from my brother’s diary, because to me it has in it the whistle of angry seawinds and the stern resistance of man to the elements. It will also give an idea of a phase of sailor’s life now passed away, as well as mark the contrast between his experience as a young officer in early command, and that of a common seaman before the mast, in both doing his manly duty cheerily.

Page 262

The voyage threw him into contact in Rio with sundry other young ex-rebels like himself, experimenting for future service in the merchant marine, and also with a Harvard man at sea for a lark, on his way to India, who held out his hand to Clarence, observing, “Hello! you, too, must be a gentleman!” They laughed, shook hands, and parted, never to meet again.

On his safe return to New York, my brother, who had not abandoned his project of entering the merchant-service, shared his quarters in that city with his old navy shipmate, Jeff Howell, a brother of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, afterward lost at sea in the wreck of a merchant vessel under his own command. At the urgent entreaty of his family, my brother abandoned this idea, and after a time spent partly at hospitable Morrisania, partly in law studies in Charleston, South Carolina, varied by fox hunting with his friends Frank Trenholm and James Morris Morgan, finally settled down in the law offices of Harrison & Wesson in New York.

Long after he was an established member of the bar, Mr. Cary avowed his weakness for spending spare time wandering on the docks of New York, studying the shipping, and filling his lungs with a whiff of salt air and his nostrils with the smell of tarred ropes.

No, we were not yet thoroughly reconstructed, and when in the spring we saw a superb review in Paris, of troops gathered in honor of the royal and imperial visitors to the “Exposition Universelle,” a poignant memory got hold of me. I thought of all those heroes of our war I had seen defile into the shades of death, of their surviving leaders, scattered, suffering ignominy, exile, or galling poverty, and my tears changed into sobs;

Page 263 there was nothing for it but to give up and ask to be taken home.

As a matter of course, we and all the other wandering children of the South we knew in Paris, were critically anxious for the release of Jefferson Davis from his two years of painful imprisonment in Fortress Monroe. His trial, long delayed, now coming on under the care of some of the most eminent counsel of the American bar, was ever in our thoughts.

The story of that trial and Mr. Davis’s release on bail was told to us in two letters from Burton Harrison (here for the first time put into print), and lifted a weight from our lives. “RICHMOND, VA., May 13, 1867.

“To-morrow’s papers may inform the far-off world of Paris that our great chieftain has been finally liberated on bail. In a little while we are to go into the courtroom where the last act of his long drama of imprisonment is to be performed - we may yet be disappointed, and may be called upon to conduct Mr. Davis again to a dungeon … we are very anxious of course - feverishly so - but there seems to be no reason to apprehend failure this time.

“I left New York early Tuesday morning and have been constantly busy moving ever since I brought the documents here which have since been published to the world, and have set the newspaper quidnuncs scribbling ten thousand crude speculations. But my long training to reticence in diplomacy, has enabled me to keep our real devices concealed from the gossips.

“Spent Wednesday and Thursday here plotting and making ready for the great day. On Friday I went down to the Fortress and there spent, with him, the last

Page 264 night of his sojourn in the bastile. It was the second anniversary of our capture. Next day we came up the river. General Burton was as courteous to his prisoner as he could be - subjected him to no restraint, brought no guards - and we travelled as amiably as a select party of gentlemen could. There were very few passengers on the boat, but it had become generally known that the chief was on board, and at every landing was assembled an enthusiastic little group to greet the President. It did my heart good to see the fervent zeal of the good people at Brandon. They came aboard and such kissing and embracing and tears as Belle Harrison, Mary Spear Nicholas and Mrs. George Harrison employed to manifest their devotion to the leader who was beaten, have never been seen out of dear old Virginia.

“We were brought to the Spotswood Hotel and Mr. and Mrs. Davis occupy the same rooms they used in 1861 when they first came to Richmond under such different circumstances. The Northern proprietor of the house has caught the zeal of the entire community and actually turned his own family out of that apartment. There are no sentinels, no guards - no stranger would suppose the quiet gentleman who receives his visitors with such peaceful dignity is the State prisoner around whose dungeon so many battalions have been marshalled for two years, and whose trial for treason against a mighty government, to-day excites the interest of mankind.

“Almost every one has called, bringing flowers and bright faces of welcome to him who has suffered vicariously for the millions. Yesterday, after service, half the congregation from St. Paul’s Church was here, and I confess I haven’t seen so many pretty women together for years.

Page 265

“A mighty army of counsel is here. O’Conor is towering in his supremacy over all lesser personages and looked like a demi-god of antiquity, yesterday, when we gathered a few of us around Mr. Davis to explain the details of his arrangements. It was a scene so remarkable for the men who constituted the group and for the occasion of their meeting that I shall never forget it.” “NEW YORK, May 18, 1867.

“My last letter was written in Richmond on the morning of the great crisis. The telegrams in the newspapers informed you of the result of our labors, and you will see accounts enough of the various scenes of the drama from newspaper correspondents. I enclose you one from the Baltimore Gazette, written by Wilkins Glenn - as good a story of what occurred as I have seen. The World will give you a report of the speeches made by O’Conor and the rest, which were very meager.

“The fact was everything had been agreed upon beforehand, between O’Conor and the Attorney General, and it was understood there should be no speeches of pretentious declamation. Each actor in the drama did his part soberly and with satisfactory precision. Although Underwood, the Judge, had received from the government an intimation of their desire that he should accept bail, we were not sure that he would not disappoint us with some assertion of the ‘independence of the judiciary.’ Underwood is the bךte noire of Richmond. The people regard him with unlimited fear and dislike. They say he has shown himself such an agent as has not sat on the bench to torment humanity, since the days of James’s Chief Justice. They were terribly frightened by the step we took in securing Mr. Davis’s removal from Fortress Monroe to be within control of the ‘Civil’

Page 266 authorities - thought it the greatest possible blunder - were certain that Underwood would avail himself of the opportunity to punish the whole Confederacy through their representative man, and looked for nothing better than a transfer of our chief from the quarters at the Fortress where the custodian was a gentleman and his surroundings were those of comfort, to the filthy dungeons of the town jail! The women were in an agony of prayer - the men more anxious than at any moment since the evacuation of Richmond.

“But it really seemed as if the deep feeling of the community had possessed the United States officials. The desire to be polite and gracious manifested itself in every one of them. After we were all in the courtroom awaiting the arrival of the judge and the prisoner, General Burton came in dressed in full uniform and followed by Mr. Davis. The marshal conducted them to the prisoner’s dock, coming immediately to me to invite me to sit by Mr. Davis, that he might feel he had a friend with him and lose the disagreeable consciousness of the presence of constables and turnkeys. As I pushed my way through the crowd I thanked the marshal heartily, and sitting down beside the prisoner felt that I was enthroned with a king.

“In a very few moments, the courtesy was extended by asking us to remove from the seat of the accused to join Mr. O’Conor and Mr. Reed within the bar. There I stood behind Mr. Davis during the whole of the proceedings, and when it was all over, was the first to congratulate him.

“Observation of this kindness on the part of the officials had inspired in anxious friends more hope in the Judge - but there was still such a dread in everybody’s eyes when Underwood was about to speak - such a perfect

Page 267 stillness in the halls as I shall rarely see again in a lawyer’s life of anxiety in courtrooms. And when the oracle came - ‘The case is undoubtedly bailable, and as the Government is not ready to proceed with the trial, and the prisoner is and for a long time has been ready and demanding trial - it seems eminently proper that bail should be allowed’ - such joy and relief as came upon all faces–!

“When it was done and ‘the prisoner discharged,’ Mr. Davis asked me to convey him as rapidly as possible from the court to his rooms at the Spotswood, and I did so in triumph.

“Our carriage was beset with a crowd frantic with enthusiasm, cheering, calling down God’s blessings, rushing forward to catch him by the hand and weeping manly tears of devotion to ‘our President.’ I shall never see such joy in a crowd again and some of the faces I saw thro’ the tears in my own eyes will remain impressed on my memory forever.

“Reaching the hotel, he took my arm through the crowd and up the stairway. The halls were full of friends waiting to congratulate him, but everybody held back with instinctive delicacy as he went in to his wife.

“In a moment I followed. Dr. Minnegerode, Miss Jenny Ritchie and Mr. George Davis were already there, helping Mrs. Davis to pass the time which we spent in the courtroom. The door was locked and we knelt around a table, while the rector offered a prayer of thanksgiving; every one of us weeping irrepressibly, for God had delivered the captive at last, and with him we were all liberated!

“After a while the doors were opened, and I ran away from the multitude of men and women who laughed and cried by turns. And now, the whole town rejoiced.

Page 268 The animosity of war was put aside, and every household vied with its neighbor in extending hospitalities to Genl. Burton and the other U. S. officials who seemed to find almost as much happiness in the result as we did. They were breakfasted, dined and toasted, till they fully realized what Virginian hospitality can be.

“We determined to take the chief as quickly as possible away from these scenes of explosive excitement, and went aboard ship that evening, coming to New York by sea to avoid the multitudes on land. He will go in a few days to visit his children in Canada. Beyond that his plans are not made.

“At the New York Hotel he has been beset by congratulating friends, and had become so nervous and weakened by continued excitement that last night I took bodily possession of him, put him into a carriage and drove him out to Mr. O’Conor’s to have a restful sleep in the country and a day or two of quiet.

“He remonstrated, but in vain. He has been so long accustomed to submit to his keepers that at last he ceased to resist and I conveyed him away forcibly.

“Mrs. Davis and Miss Howell went to see Ristori - her last night in New York. I suppose they will be in town for a day or two longer, and I shall continue to be in diligent attendance. But the decree which admitted Mr. Davis to bail, liberated me also - and from that moment I was released from all bonds - save one.

“The past is now the past - all is now in the future.”

No one could read this loyal outpouring of a young man’s enthusiasm for a fallen chief with any doubt that his friendship and hearty desire to serve Mr. Davis continued always. Many letters in my possession attest the warmth of their mutual regard; but the course of

Page 269 their lives, diverging at this point, never ran in parallel lines again. When Mrs. Davis, after her widowhood, lost her gifted daughter Winnie, and was to carry the body almost in state, for interment in Richmond, she sent for my husband to accompany her, and leaned upon him like a son.

Our days in Paris, when we returned to the Hotel France et Choiseul in the autumn for shopping, were nearly over.

I have recorded the preceding glimpses of the French capital in the later days of imperial rיgime because it has never been, in outward show, so splendid since the reign of Napoleon III and his beautiful consort.

The exposition brought into its streets thousands of visitors and many of the sovereigns of Europe, or their representatives. The great show itself was (in comparison with its successors everywhere) rather meagre and disappointing. Save for the exhibits of France and Austria there was nothing resplendent to be seen. It was, indeed, with a long sigh of relief of mind and body that we went away from the modern Babylon, in June, into beautiful rural Switzerland.

Except that we made the ascent of the Grand St. Bernard Pass with a party of English friends, a little too early in the season to be safe, and were taken in, almost exhausted, by the Clavendier and monks at the hospice, there was nothing of moment to record. My cousin, Anne Cary Morris, came out to join us, also the James Howard McHenrys, of Baltimore, so that our little group of kinsfolk made a happy oasis in that summer of beautiful wandering.

In the autumn we received an invitation from Charles Wykeham Martin, Esq., M.P. to Kent, to make him a visit at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, before returning

Page 270 to America. It was the first time either of us had been in England, and I had the surprise of hearing my good mother say to herself, devoutly, as we landed: “Thank God, I have at last set foot upon the soil of home!” The blood of her tory ancestors had evidently not been chilled in her veins by the lapse of a century of republicanism , or, perhaps, as she could no longer claim Virginia, she would have naught else but England! She was further made happy by cordial welcome in one of the loveliest old castles in England, overflowing with potraits, busts, books, and relics of her family. My bedroom, a tower chamber once occupied by the maids of honor of poor Anne Boleyn, during Henry VIII’s ownership of the castle, looking across the moat into a park where deer were seen grazing or vanishing amid great tree boles, filled my own measure of satisfaction. The grandson of our kind old friend is the present owner of the property. We had the pleasure, upon our arrival at Leeds Castle, of beholding, set in the oak of the mantel-piece in the banquet-hall, a replica of our portrait of Henry, the fourth Lord Fairfax, of the seventeenth century (the “missing link” they called it in England, long years since vanished into America), which we had brought over, the year before, to be cleaned in London, allowing this copy to be made for Leeds Castle, another for Colonel Ackroyd, of Yorkshire. The copy of the graceful young man in armor still keeps its place at Leeds Castle, but the original, after sundry wanderings in the New World, has now “brought up” on the wall of my library in which these lines are penned.

After an inspiring visit to London, we re-embarked at Southampton in the Western Metropolis, a poor old side-wheel steamer, put on by the Guion Line to replace the one in which we had engaged passage. While

Page 271 crossing recently in a new “monster of the deep,” with every luxury from a lift to a Ritz restaurant and wireless telegraphy aboard, I thought of our sailing in that wretched tub on an autumn voyage through stormy seas, when it took sixteen days to bring us from shore to shore, and for a week we rolled and plunged over mighty billows, hardly crediting that she could survive the storm. We ate such meals as we could at table in a saloon into which opened the cabins where lay and groaned our ailing fellow-passengers. Annie Morris and I, soon recovering from malaise, persisted in playing the part of stormy petrels upon deck.

All things have an end, and one bright day in early November saw us landing at New York, and carrying through the customs a set of very important trunks from Paris. On the 26th of November I was married to Burton Harrison in the little church, St. Ann’s, built by my uncle, Gouverneur Morris, to the memory of his mother, my brother giving me away. We returned to Morrisania for the reception, where were present a large assemblage of representatives of New York and Virginian families, with a contingent of Yale men, and of “Bones men” summoned by the bridegroom to stand by their loyal brother on his translation into married life.

To complete the requirements of a family chronicle, (this chiefly for my granddaughters), I will add that the bride wore a gown made by “Caroline Boyer, Faubourg St. Honorי, Paris,” of white satin with large pipings of the same, heading frills of blonde lace; a full tulle veil and a coronet of orange blossoms; that her bridesmaids appeared in Paris confections of white tarlatan with many skirts, bodices of white satin, and wreaths and bouquets of lilies of the valley; and that the bride’s

Page 272 going-away gown, of marron velvet with a toque made of a pheasant’s breast crowned with a golden rose and foliage, supported her during the trying ordeal of coming down the stairs into the old panelled hall, between the Marie Antoinette mirrors and tapestries of the Reign of Terror, into a lane of people headed by men joyously singing old Yale ditties as the carriage drove away!

Page 273 CHAPTER XII

WHAT an odd, provincial, pleasant little old New York was that of the seventies, just when the waves of after-the- war prosperity had begun to strike its sides and make it feel the impulse toward a progress never afterward to cease!

Broadway, a long, unlovely thoroughfare, was filled with huddled buildings, monotonous in line and tint. Union and Madison Squares were still inclosed in high railings (removed after 1871 and sold at auction), their grass and trees, as now, a great relief to the eye in passing. Fifth Avenue, fringed on either side with telegraph poles, was abominably paved with irregular blocks of stone, so that a drive to the park, or “away up-town to Fiftieth Street,” was accompanied by much wear and tear to the physical and nervous system. The celebrated and delightful Dr. Fordyce Barker used to say he actually could not recommend a convalescent patient to take the air, because of the necessary jolting in a carriage in any direction away from the residential quarter.

Apart from this discomfort, the noise of continuous passage of vehicles knowing not rubber tires made open windows in one’s home a purgatorial trial. Certainly, we modern grumblers in asphalted streets heave no sigh of regret for that feature of the dear old by-gone says!

Plodding up and down town jogged the lamentable old omnibuses, filled, as Mr. J. W. Cross once said of them, “exactly the way we stuff the carts with calves in London.” A sorry spectacle, indeed, was that of well-dressed,

Page 274 well-bred New Yorkers clinging to straps, jaded, jammed, jostled, panting in the aisle of these hearse-like equipages, to reach their goal. An astute traveller from France, Monsieur Simonet, in an article published at that time in the Revue des Deux Mondes, guilelessly records that he was “told in New York” it was the custom of “the ladies,” on getting into a full omnibus in Fifth Avenue, to seat themselves on the knees of “gentlemen” already placed! The conditions of horse-cars in the neighboring avenues showed for many years no improvement upon this discomfort, and the prices of “hacks” and “coaches,” procured after much preamble at the livery-stables, were prohibitive save for the solvent citizen. On New-Year’s-Day, when calls were made by men upon the families of their friends, it was common for four of the intending visitors to unite in paying forty dollars for the hire of a ponderous old hack, of the Irish funeral variety, and go their rounds clad in evening dress, rumbling over the stony streets, from mid-day till dinner-time at six o’clock.

In the absence of cabs, hansoms, and the sportive “taxis” - then as unimaginable as the air-ship in common use appears to-day - walking was very much in vogue. It was a general practice of professional men, possessing offices down town to go afoot in all weathers from their dwellings to their business haunts and back again. A lawyer prominent in that day lately said to me: “And weren’t we the better for it, I’d like to know? Who doesn’t remember Clarkson Potter’s handsome, erect figure and springing step, like a boy’s in middle-age; and David Dudley Field who always took his exercise in that way (as well as on horseback, with a rest before dinner). Wasn’t he a picture of vigor in later life? No dieting and health foods about those men,

Page 275 I’ll promise you. And what a cheery meeting-place Broadway was for friends!”

It must be remembered, though, that the residential part of town was then far south of its present limit. Arrogant old Isaac Brown, of Grace Church, the portly sexton who transmitted invitations for the elect, protested to one of his patronesses that he really could not undertake to “run society” beyond Fiftieth Street.

Central Park was already beginning to be beautiful in verdant slopes and flowering shrubs and trees, although still surrounded, and the way to it disfigured, by hill-sides from which segments were cut away like slices from a cheese, upon the summit of which perched the cabins of Irish squatters left high and dry by the march of municipal progress. The territory around these dwellings was populous with curs, urchins, goats, pigs, and mounds of dיbris revealing old tin cans and discarded hoop-skirts.

To reach old Morrisania, we generally walked to the car-sheds on the site of the present Madison Square Garden, there taking our seats in a train of ordinary day-coaches, drawn in sections by horses along Fourth Avenue, through the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street - then a drear and malodorous vault! - to the Grand Central Station where locomotives were attached. The alternative to this method of reaching Mott Haven was an hour spent in an ill-ventilated, car of the Third Avenue line, drawn by shambling, staggering horses, and crammed with an East Side population bearing babies and market-baskets in equal numbers. For a brief time the company put upon this line what they called a “palace car,” large, clean, and comfortable, charging ten cents for a fare. But the great American public that has always dominated New

Page 276 York condemned this as an aristocratic luxury, and so it passed from sight. Later on, when we began to achieve Harlem by means of the elevated road, I remember going out one day to my uncle’s house for luncheon, accompanied by our friend Eugene Schuyler, who had recently made his adventurous journey into Turkestan. On crossing part of the towering trestle work beyond Central Park, he declared he felt positively ill with apprehension, begging me please to return by boat, train, horse-car - anything - rather than repeat this alarming experience!

Dinners then, as now, the touch-stone of highest civilization, were numerous, but the hours set for them much earlier than now. From six o’clock we moved on to half-past six, then to ultra-fashionable seven, and lastly to eight o’clock, where the generality of people are still content to assemble for the prandial meal. To my mind, those dinners have never been surpassed in true elegance and charm, although totally lacking in the sensational features of decoration, gifts, and cookery developed by later generations of New Yorkers. By the owners of certain stately homes possessing chefs and wines of admitted merit, formal banquets after the foreign fashion were given in the best style. But well-bred people of less pretension to great wealth and the custom of elaborate entertaining were satisfied to bid their friends to meals served to the last nicety in silver, damask, porcelain, and glass, by their own customary attendants, and cooked by their own resident artists after a fashion habitual to them in the family menu of every day - a practice happily pursued in many aristocratic homes of Britain and to be seen in kindly easy Washington, but little familiar in New York to-day.

What would have been thought in that epoch of New

Page 277 York of a table stretched to the limit of the dining-room, with chairs so pushed together as to prevent free movement with spoon and fork; where forty or more guests, corralled to eat insidious messes served by caterers are shepherded by strange waiters on tiptoe thrusting between them fish, flesh, and fowl, with their attendant cates and condiments, at quarters so close the alarmed diner must shrink back in order to avoid contact with the offered dish!

No, that was hardly the way they served dinners in the seventies! Rather were friends convened to the number of ten or twelve around mahoganies of generous size and space (small enough for talk to fly easily across them), and host and hostess were near enough to their guests to mark their own individuality upon the feast. Upon the authority of the late Mr. Ward McAllister, we are told, that “Blue Seal Johannisberg flowed like water; incomparable ‘48 claret, superb Burgundies and amber-colored Madeira were there to add to the intoxicating delight” of the best New York dinner and supper tables. But, as the present chronicler has never been able to distinguish old wine from new, she fears in this matter she is in the category of a certain well-known literary lady of New York, of whom Mr. Ward McAllister once remarked to me with scathing emphasis: “SHE write stories of New York society! Why, I have seen her, myself, buying her Madeira at Park & Tilford’s in a demijohn.”

It is not in me to offer regretful comparison of the New York of my first acquaintance, its people content to dwell in barns of brick with brown-stone fronts, its chief avenues as yet untouched by the finger of art in beautiful buildings, some of its streets yet encumbered with rows of trucks and wagons kept there

Page 278 by their owners for want of a place of shelter, ash and refuse barrels in all their hideous offensiveness standing by the basement doors of refined citizens, with our later city of wondrous progress, a gathering-place of the art of the whole wide world, as well as a sovereign of finance!

But putting aside the physical aspects of the place; forgetting certain inherited crudities of custom, its vulgar or lifeless architecture, I have never seen reason to renounce my belief that the period I write of was illustrated by the best society New York has known since colonial days. It is generally admitted by commentators of our social life to-day that the rock we split upon is the lack of leadership. As to who are the present real great ladies of New York, there is in the public mind a nebulous uncertainty only occasionally dispelled by the dictum of some writer for the newspapers.

In the earlier period, New York possessed what none could question: a sovereignty over its body corporate divided between five or six gentlewomen of such birth, breeding, and tact that people were always satisfied to be led by them. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Lewis Morris Rutherford, Mrs. Belmont, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, and the two Mrs. Astors were the ladies whose entertainments claimed most comment, whose fiat none were found to dispute.

Of these, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily the most beautiful; and in the graciousness of her manner and that inherent talent for winning and holding the sympathetic interest of those around her, I have seen none to surpass her. One asks oneself why such loveliness of line and tinting, why such sweet courtesy of manner, cannot be passed down the years instead of dying upon the stem like a single perfect flower! Why

Page 279 nature, having formed such a combination, should not be content with repeating it! This lady was of Southern birth, and many stories were whispered of her unhappiness during the war because of the fulminations of the Northern family into which she had married against her Confederate kin and sympathies. I remember her, first, in a small, inconspicuous house, one of a brown-stone row in a street between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, where her afternoons at home seemed somehow to convey a waft of violets, of which blossoms she had many surrounding her; and the service of her door and tea-table was performed by neat little maids dressed in lilac print gowns, with muslin aprons and caps surmounted by bows of ribbon in the same shade. In the course of time the Roosevelts moved uptown into a handsome modern house in west Fifty-seventh Street. There a great ball was given, to which we went. I believe it was to celebrate the entrance into society of the eldest daughter, and the story was circulated that eleven hundred invitations had been sent forth. I find this mentioned in a letter written to my mother in Baltimore, by whom I was besought to keep her au courant of everything, big or little, in my new experience. I have no souvenirs to contribute concerning the early youth of the future President, but I fancy he was then enjoying the glorious indifference of sturdy boyhood to the social happenings of the hour.

Mrs. Belmont was a woman of charm and distinction, to whom fortune had allotted means and opportunity to take the lead in entertainments of the grandiose foreign order, in a great house, with an illumined picture-gallery and everything on a corresponding scale. It was said of her later in life that much sorrow and the tragic death of one of her sons in that stately mansion

Page 280 had taken from her all power of enjoying it; a commentary that might appropriately be made upon the experience of many others we have seen ride for awhile on the crest of the social wave, then pass away into shadows.

Mrs. John Jacob Astor was at the time I first came to New York a noble-looking woman, full of gracious sweetness and wide humanity. Her parties were a happy union of the best elements procurable in New York, surrounded by all that wealth and taste could add to originality of conception. Her Southern blood revealed itself in the cordiality and simplicity with which this lady bore her honors of leadership.

Mrs. Hamilton Fish, a matron of exemplary dignity who transferred her regnant attitude toward society from New York to Washington, where her husband was Secretary of State in Grant’s administration, belonged to the Faubourg St. Germain side of New York, the Second Avenue “set,” embracing a number of old-school families of colonial ancestry who had not thought it worth their while to remove from their broad and spacious residences on the East Side to emulate the mere fashion of living in Fifth Avenue.

In this quarter abode also Mrs. Rutherfurd, wife of the gentle and learned astronomer. Their oldest son, Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, had reversed his name on inheriting the Stuyvesant fortune. His first marriage was with Miss Pierrepont, of Brooklyn, a picturesque beauty much beloved by her friends. They inherited a large mansion not far from his father’s. No parties seemed more agreeable to me, more an exponent of the best New York could do in the way of uniting gentlepeople all of a kind, than Mrs. Rutherfurd’s. That pair presented the unusual combination of an uncommonly

Page 281 beautiful woman married to an uncommonly handsome and distinguished man. Mrs. Rutherfurd was a law-giver in her circle, and no weak one; she invited whom she pleased, as she pleased; and an offender against her exactions came never any more. But she had the prettiest way in the world of putting people in appropriate place.

It was on the East Side of town that we, “reconstructed” rebels, first pitched our tent in New York, so long to be our home, in a building since locally remarked for the number of “people one knows” who made a beginning there. This was the apartment house built by Mr. Rutherfurd Styuvesant, in Eighteenth Street near staid and well-mannered little Irving Place. Our flat was diminutive in size like all the rest, and not especially sunny, situated at the summit of two long flights of stairs, of small account in those days when Rosalind’s complaint to Jupiter rarely occurred to us. This “apartment,” as we took care to call it, thinking “flat” had a vulgar sound, had been engaged while yet in lath and plaster, and we climbed workmen’s ladders to survey our future domicile. The suites, it was said, were mostly taken in this way, by friends or relatives of the proprietor, the list producing a very old Knickerbocker sort of effect upon the outside mind.

I am sure no perfectly equipped Fifth Avenue establishment, fitted up beforehand by the fairies who obey the wands of millionaires, ever gave to a young couple the delight we took in our simple quarters. The contrast with surroundings in the war-worn South made the simple necessaries of life, disposed with taste and harmony, seem a fairy tale. I had brought from Paris some understanding of the decorative value of crיtonne in small rooms, and the French gray of my

Page 282 little salon, with its draperies and furniture of gray crיtonne relieved by medallions of pale blue enshrining shepherds and shepherdesses, hearts and darts, pipes and tabors tangled with knots of ribbon, filled the measure of my ambition as a housekeeper.

A curious instance of the result of the Commune in Paris was the drifting to our shores of many of the miscreants who had worked havoc with the beauty and done to death the fair fame of that imperial city, under the guise of patriotism. My recollection of the hard-working, cheery servants at the Ville au Bois, up early and to bed late, serving delicious meals and keeping the house in every part agleam with cleanliness, disposed me to make my first efforts at securing domestic service among those of their nationality in New York.

The rather prompt result was the installation of two women concerning whom close scrutiny failed to arouse the demon Doubt in our artless minds. The cook, Suzanne, otherwise Mme. Dubois, wife of a clock-maker with whom she had emigrated to America, hoping to set up a shop and dispose of an assortment of his wares, had the handsome tragic mask of some actress of the Comטdie Franחaise. She was dark, capable, and silent; respectful in manner, but with an expression that more than once suggested to me one of those matrons of the Terror who sat knitting while royal and aristocratic heads dropped into the basket beneath the guillotines. From the date of her arrival things moved smoothly in her domain, and her excellent cuisine made housekeeping a summer’s day. Florence, her friend and comrade, who went about her work singing, in the frilled cap and apron of a heroine of Bיranger or Murger, was an extremely pretty girl, silver-voiced and nearly always smiling.

Page 283

By and by we began to detect in the long hall leading from the back stairs to our kitchen stealthy footsteps, arriving daily just as our dinner was going off. Later on in the evening more footsteps, and from afar the sound of muffled voices. It was evident that Suzanne’s husband did not neglect a diurnal visit to his spouse. Poor M. Dubois, Suzanne explained to us, had been unfortunate in his venture. Madame, she observed, had several mantels needing clocks. Would madame allow M. Dubois the privilege of decorating them with a few choice specimens of his unsold time-pieces for which he had no place?

Madame, rashly acquiescing, on returning home one afternoon found every room in the flat adorned with a costly clock, all ticking and chiming together with distracting regularity; and that evening the number of visitors to the kitchen increased perceptibly, the household bills making a corresponding jump upward in the week.

Soon, Suzanne and her bosom friend Florence had a hot quarrel, which raged until Florence, bouncing into the drawing-room, informed madame that the Duboises, having been in the front rank of the horrible “vengeurs de la Rיpublique” in the Commune, had fled to America through fear of the guillotine; and that our daily caller was none other than the infamous wretch who boasted that his shot had killed the good and gentle archbishop of Paris, Darboy, in the massacre of the hostages at the prison of La Roquette!

Next day Suzanne took her leave, polite to the end, but with a vengeful gleam in her cold eye that boded ill for the informing Florence. The clocks vanished from our mantels, M. Dubois came not again, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I had escaped so easily from the

Page 284 hands of the handsome pיtroleuse. Next, pretty Florence also took her leave, declaring that she needed “protection,” being forced to give up service through fear of the Duboises, and departed bag and baggage in company with a “Monsieur,” who called for her in a cab. After that we made no more experiments in foreign domestics, contenting ourselves with unadulterated Irish.

We now found ourselves in a circle of acquaintances, alien in political creed, with a few exceptions among the Southerners already established in New York, but most kind and considerate always, and every year the number grew and firmer friendships were cemented.

I cannot pretend to be chronologically exact as to the social events of those years or their sequences. We went out a great deal, as appears from the series of letters addressed to my mother, my most constant correspondent. There is the record of a ball at the Academy of Music of which Lord Dufferin was the bright particular star among the guests, with Sir Tatton and Lady Sykes and some other smart English folk in the party. Mrs. Edward Cooper, of Lexington Avenue, who entertained much and well, had asked us to be of this gathering, occupying two boxes, and to sup at a large table served for her. Lord Dufferin, with his delightful Irish gayety, resembled a schoolboy “out for fun.” I had been dancing with him, and was sitting afterward enjoying his sparkling wit, when the movement to supper was inaugurated. At once he arose and gallantly offered me his arm, when I stopped him with a sepulchral whisper: “Oh, thank you, but I can’t! You are expected to take in Mrs. Cooper, don’t you see?” Lord Dufferin did see, and with quick tact rectified his blunder, while kind Mr. Cooper, who I felt mortally sure had never meant to ask me, but had been looking

Page 285 forward to conducting the jolly, handsome Lady Sykes, stepped promptly up and led me off. He had Lady Sykes on his other hand, however, while I had no more of adorable Lord Dufferin until we were breaking up, when he came back again with a rattling fire of chaff. I have rarely met so agreeable a companion, and the story of the closing in of his honored life amid troubles and distress of mind, brought upon him by those whom he had trusted in business overmuch, was a source of real regret.

To the Academy of Music we repaired for public balls and operas. Till late at night on those occasions quiet, sleepy Irving Place would resound with the roll of fashionable carriages and the hoarse call, by the doormen, of fashionable names or their equivalent numbers. And oh! the song-birds caged for our delectation in that dear old Temple of Music! There Patti, Nilsson, Gerster, Pauline Lucca, Annie Louise Cary, Kellogg, Minnie Hauk, Parepa-Rosa, Brignoli, Capoul, Campanini, Del Puente, and a host of others, sang our hearts out of our bodies many a time. Once when Campanini had caught sight of the great Salvini sitting in a box near the stage while he was taking the part of Don Josי in “Carmen,” he rose to the occasion in quite an extraordinary way, acting and singing superbly. After he was disposed of by the toreador’s dagger and came back to life before the foot-lights in the usual way, we all saw that he was pallid with real emotion. The house sprang upon its feet, handkerchiefs waved, roar after roar of applause went up; but Campanini’s eyes sought those of Salvini only. The tragedian, leaning forward, clapped his hands until he could do no more. It was an event in musical recollection. Years later I was invited to a spring meeting of an amateur club in

Page 286 a fashionable New York house, where Campanini, then in his decline of power and popularity, was engaged to alternate with the club’s peformances. He sang several times beautifully, but with a failing voice, and there was but lukewarm applause, after the noisy plaudits bestowed by their friends upon the amateurs. I saw him standing back, alone, waiting his next turn, and, unable to resist the impulse of sympathy with this artistic giant in bonds, I went over and said a few words, incidentally recalling the occasion above described, when he acted and sang a whole opera for Salvini. Instantly Campanini’s face flushed, his eyes kindled, and he broke into warm, excited eulogy of the great tragedian of his native country. The impression left upon me by these two scenes in an artist’s life was ineffaceable.

Page 287 CHAPTER XIII

I WAS connected with a musical movement in New York society inaugurated by a number of gentlemen, of which Mr. George Templeton Strong was the president. It was called the Church Musical Association, the director, Dr. Pech, an Englishman thoroughly trained in such conductorship. We had one hundred volunteers, including many people in society, and fifty paid singers in the choruses, with an orchestra of one hundred musicians, many of them from the Philharmonic orchestra, of which Mr. Strong was also, or had been, president. Our rehearsals - solid, hard work, no shirking or favoritism anywhere - were held in some rooms belonging to Trinity Chapel. Dr. Pech, a cold, rather sardonic man, thoroughly knew his business and brought us on rapidly. Particularly did we progress in sight-reading, and the hours of deciphering those grand masses were a keen pleasure.

Our matinיes and concerts were held at stated intervals in Steinway Hall before large and fashionable audiences. I sat among the sopranos beside Mrs. George Strong, and there was great excitement when Dr. Pech found it necessary to raise our seats above the instrumentalists. We all declared we felt like blondes in a transformation scene, but that was soon forgotten in dealing with the “Twelfth Mass” of Mozart, followed by the first act of Weber’s “Oberon,” with fine professional soloists. We soon realized the additional breadth of sound gained by our elevated position.

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All of us felt it an honor to sing in Steinway Hall, every beam and rafter of which was embalmed in memories of the music that had been heard there. It was the very home and shrine of the glorious art. There I heard successively on the piano Thalberg, Rubinstein, Joseffy, Essipoff, Mehlig, Adטle Aus der Ohe, Arabella Goddard, Madeline Schiller, and thrilled response to the magic bows of Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, Sarasate, Carl Rosa, Camilla Urso, and Ole Bull on the violin. There I listened to the performances in concert of Patti, Albani, Marie Rose, Parepa-Rosa, Gazzaniga, Materna, Lilli Lehmann, Nordica, and a host of other sweet singing birds of exalted fame. There, too, sang Campanini, Wachtel, Santley, and Maurel, big Formטs and graceful Joseph Jamet, who as a poseur in Mephistopheles I never saw surpassed. And there, wielding the batons that sent afloat the waves of all this heavenly melody, we had Thomas, Leopold Damrosch, Seidl, Max Maretzek and other great leaders of their day.

The last number of our first public concert was a hymn in the Jubel overture: “Rise, crowned with light, Imperial Salem rise,” glorious words wedded to the air of the Russian National Anthem, and the great volume of it most inspiring! I have often felt, since the Church Musical Association expired, what a good use it was to which to put amateurs in society, as well as a delightful training in that noble form of music. For two years we studied and sang over a wide field of ancient and modern church music, none of us flagging in zeal or interest.

I had begun lessons with dear old Ronconi, with his pretty adoptive daughter to play the accompaniments, and in the spring sang in a chorus at his concert given

Page 289 at the Jerome Theatre, corner of 26th Street and Madison Avenue. The next season I sang with Ronconi the duo from “Elisire d’Amore,” at a charity concert in the hall of the new Young Men’s Christian Association building. Ronconi, it will be remembered, had been one of the greatest dramatic singers of his day, and as an actor it was said of him by a writer in the Saturday Review: “Ronconi was simply an incomparable master of all the secrets and all the resources of his art; by instinct, by temperament, by natural genius and patient study, a consummate master and one who neither on the lyric or any other stage, has left any successor to eclipse his memory among those who can recall his performances in ‘Lucrezia Borgia,’ in the ‘Due Foscari,’ in ‘Maria de Rohan,’ and the ‘Flauto Magico,’ and in the ‘Barbiטre.’ Versatile as Garrick, terrible and pathetic as Kean, romantic and audacious as the great Frederick, farcical as Liston, he touched all chords and played on all strings with a hand that never forgot its cunning, and knew how to shake his audiences with pity, terror, laughter at his will. Never was an actor more richly endowed with such magnetic power of holding an audience in his grasp, of making them feel his presence on the stage. Ronconi’s voice, despite all this, was rather harsh and unsympathetic.”

Although warned to expect it, I was hardly prepared for his introduction of impromptu spoken words and phrases, for his pacing about the narrow stage and eliciting bursts of laughter from the audience, by droll faces and posturings I was too much alarmed to see during the progress of our performance. I really think the old fellow totally forgot the existence of his soprano, who, on her part, was only thankful she had been able to get to the final note without a break. When we had finished

Page 290 and my maestro gave me his hand for a final bow to the public, I ventured a glance at his overpoweringly funny old face and no longer wondered at the hilarity of our hearers.

The rest of the programme I do not recall, save that the committee had been lucky enough to secure as star performer Madame Anna Mehlig, the great German pianiste. An incident of that evening was a loud, portentous cracking, as if of lath and plaster, occurring during the entr’acte. Mr. Chauncey Depew, one of the managers, was, in a moment, upon the stage facing the excited audience, explaining that the sound meant nothing but the expansion and contraction of new wood in the building; one of those ready and graceful little speeches of his that in this case obviated a panic. As he concluded with a good story, everybody laughed and settled down into peace and good-humor for the remainder of the concert.

In the spring I undertook to give a musicale to about thirty or forty guests, and find recorded my fears as to how “all these grand musicians are to be accommodated in my bird’s nest”; for my performers were no less than Ronconi, Miss Adelaide Phillips, the famous contralto; Mrs. Gulager, Mr. Koppell, tenor, Mr. von Inten, pianist, and Mr. Werner, ‘Court-violoncellist to the King of Paraguay.’ “All the rest might be fitted in, but I dread the big fiddle from the Court of Paraguay!”

Everything went well, and my fears were soon allayed. The affair gave pleasure to a very critical, if small audience, and the dear people who had performed for me for love, remained afterward for a high tea with substantial dishes, at which we waited on ourselves and had royal fun. I find a full description of this ambitious venture detailing both musical and culinary

Page 291 programme, to which was added this significant paragraph:

“The baby, fortunately, was invited out for the afternoon.”

We had a musical club, meeting at the home, in Madison Square, of Mr. and Mrs. S. L. M. Barlow, where we did earnest work. Miss Elsie Barlow was, of course, the leading spirit of the affair; Miss Eloise Breese was a member, and others whose names I fail to recall. The atmosphere of that wide, beautiful house, with the highbred mother and daughter to inspire it, was in the best sense an artistic one. This set of girls was said to have inspired Laurence Oliphant’s “Irene McGillicuddy,” but I do not vouch for the truth of the story.

Mrs. Ronalds, who to-day has all musical and fashionable London thronging the rooms and stairways of her little house in Sloane Street, eager to hear the artists she assembles, was then in the zenith of her remarkable beauty, singing adorably in private and on the concert stage for charity. At an entertainment given at the little theatre built by Mr. Jerome, she won golden opinions as a prima donna of high society.

Mr. Edmund Schermerhorn, of West Twenty-Third Street, used to give musical afternoons where one was sure of hearing only the best talent, professional and amateur. There, also, were enjoyed charming duos from his nieces, Misses Schermerhorn, whose refined style and technique reflected credit upon their instructor, Madame Bodstein, much in vogue among the old families of New York.

I find a letter in which is recorded that Mrs. Rutherfurd called for me to go to a concert by Mrs. Gulager, where the applause was tremendous and the

Page 292 flowers so numerous they required a separate carriage to convey them home. This lady had a deserved reputation as a coloratura singer, both in society and on the concert stage, and her voice was most beautiful and flexible.

Mr. Roosevelt, who lived on Broadway near Grace Church, an uncle of the future President and father of Mr. Hilborne Roosevelt, afterward the maker of fine organs, was, like Mr. Edmund Schermerhorn, a musical virtuoso of a high order of merit. When we went to his parties we found him confined to a rolling chair, indeed, but very much alert in directing and controlling his performers and audiences. Woe betide the fashionable chatterer who dared venture a word out of season while music was going on. As a consequence, there were delightful instrumental treats of which no note was suffered to escape unheeded, and many soloists, vocal and instrumental. Our host won my heart by asking me for “Vedrai Carino” and “Dove Sono,” by Mozart, in which Archaimbaud and Ronconi had both drilled me carefully, and which I felt I could at least sing correctly.

While all the world was going daft over the exquisite singing and virginal loveliness of Christine Nilsson, no less than the ineffably gallant and delicate acting of Victor Capoul in his various rפles as her lover, my teacher, old Ronconi, invited me to see a rehearsal of Italian opera at the Academy. We had the big dusky auditorium pretty much to ourselves, with a few others, to see the caste of the following day’s performance of “Somnambula” go through their paces in walking dress, with overcoats, hats, sticks, etc. Amina (was she Gerster? I am not sure,) in furs, with her jacket tightly buttoned, tripped over the bridge with reluctant

Page 293 footsteps, and everybody sang א demi-voix. Rather disillusionizing, certainly, but not so much so as my talk with the elegant M. Capoul, who was presented to me when he came strolling around into the house. In the course of it, I spoke of the diva, Nilsson, her perfect voice, her fine art, and great personal beauty.

“The only trouble with Mlle. Nilsson,” responded her ardent swain, with a malicious twinkle in his eye, “c’est qu’elle a les mains d’un crapaud” (the hands of a frog).

“Oh! Oh!” I protested, in veritable distress. “Faust to say this of his Marguerite!” And Faust laughed with a glee borrowed from Mephistopheles.

Nilsson was at the time a great favorite in society. She had headquarters at the Clarendon Hotel, where in her free moments she was surrounded by an adoring clique of young matrons and maidens who found her frank cordiality and good-fellowship a great attraction. When one has lived long enough to see the completion or shaping out of a career, it is interesting to note its extremes. For many years I failed to see this lady, until once at Monte Carlo, strolling through the salle-de-jeu (which I have always found the most oppressive and least interesting place where idle Americans go to look on, in Europe!), the Countess de Miranda was pointed out to me sitting at one of the tables, absorbed in her game. A thin black veil was tightly drawn over her face, which bore but faint resemblance to that of the radiant “Queen of the Night” at the Chגtelet in Paris, to the enchanting Marguerite of the spinning-wheel, to the impersonator of a dozen rפles in which the great singer appeared to ride as in a fairy chariot over the hearts of vast, tumultuous audiences!

Other social favorites were the two distinguished

Page 294 young American prime donne, Miss Clara Louise Kellogg and Miss Adelaide Phillips. A Kellogg and Brignoli night at the Academy was sure to bring throngs of enthusiasts. Though Brignoli’s voice was mellow and tuneful, the famous tenor possessed an ungraceful, bulky frame, and his progress across the stage ill accorded with the lover’s rפles in which he had always to appear. One wonders if the obese, middle-aged men who are so often called upon to sustain these parts embodying a mimicry of passion that only youth makes tolerable, do not come, in time, to hate the fair ladies before whom they must be forever posturing and grimacing with hand on heart!

Miss Phillips was a delightful, whole-souled woman, famed for her Azucena, the gypsy mother in “Trovatore,” a notably fine production. Madame Etelka Gerster was for a time a supreme favorite at the Academy. As Amina in “Somnambula,” Lucia, and several similar parts she was incomparable. Pauline Lucca also held us in thrall with her rather mignonne beauty and exquisite rich soprano voice.

The Philharmonic Society’s concerts, and their final rehearsals held on the day previous, were occasions when the big old theatre was packed to its utmost capacity. At the rehearsals, women and girls crowded in till the lobbies were unpleasantly congested with eager and palpitant femininity. In spring and summer all the world resorted to the open-air concerts of the wizard, Theodore Thomas, at the Central Park. His orchestra, like its leader, was in the first rank of musical excellence. In the stroll during the entr’actes, the fashionable world met and discussed the programme and each other. No old-time New Yorker of musical sympathy, but will answer to the rappel of the charming Mendelssohn

Page 295 Glee Club. The first concert I attended given by this distinguished amateur association of male voices, was in a small room or hall on Broadway somewhere near Grace Church, when Mrs. Arthur, wife of the future President, sang the soprano soli for their chorus. Mr. Mosenthal conducted with the vigor and knowledge that kept this organization upon a high plane of excellence for many years. I think it might have been twenty years later, after I had been hearing them off and on during that time, that I was present at one of their concerts, to outward appearance much the same, save that the leader had lost the slenderness of youth and the hall was some grand up-to-date interior.

One can’t fail to experience a sense of regret that the great, swelling wave of noble professional music from the foremost artists of the world has long ago swept away every trace of amateur attempt to appear before a critical audience of New York society. With the present abundance and accessibility of operas and concerts, large and small, there is literally no room for music of the second grade, whereby amateurs earnest in pursuit of the divine art lose an immense deal of wholesome and uplifting pleasure.

I remember so well years later when the “music of the future” first possessed the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House. We were dining in Lenox, at the house of Mr. William Whitney, in company with Mr. George Haven, when the conversation turned upon the prospects for opera in the forthcoming season, both Mr. Whitney and Mr. Haven being directors of the opera. Mr. Haven told us they had, with much uncertainty as to the success of the venture, engaged a German company, and were going to give Wagner’s operas. With the most comical face, he confessed that he knew nothing

Page 296 whatever about Wagner, and doubted if Whitney did, or “any of the rest of our fellows.” But they were going to make the venture all the same, and “let Damrosch have his way.”

The first season was rather uphill work in educating the New York public. The owners of the boxes who felt they had a mission to accomplish, and the large German population in the galleries, did their best, but many of the evenings were manifestly “slow.” People protested against the long spaces of uninteresting dialogue in which Wagner explained his plots. They declared he had no sense of humor to help him in lightening the burden of his magnificent metaphysics. Finally, it came to pass that in the two rows of boxes containing devoted stockholders and their guests, the spectacle was seen of many cold shoulders turned upon the stage, while conversation went on merrily until the music-lovers in the audience hissed it down. I sent a little joke to Life which, as they considered it to embody two dollars’ worth of fun, I will repeat. ” Friend of the family (visiting Mrs. Bullion in her parterre-box at the Metropolitan Opera, during a performance of the ‘Flying Dutchman’): ‘What is that strange noise in the cloakroom back of the box?’ Mrs. Bullion: ‘Oh! don’t mind. It’s only the girls playing bean-bags with their callers. They’re young, poor things, and must have something to pass away the time.’”

One evening when a parterre-box was sent to me, I invited to accompany us the American Minister to Greece - Mr. Walker Fearn - and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Whitridge, the latter a daughter of Matthew Arnold. We had “Tristan and Isolde” with Lilli Lehmann, Vogl, and Fischer, Seidl conducting gloriously, a perfect banquet of high art. I asked Mrs.

Page 297 Whitridge about her father’s beautiful poem, “Tristan and Iseult,” whether this performance in illustration of the theme would not arouse his enthusiasm.

“Not at all,” said she. “He never enjoyed the music of the Wagner operas, but would go to them in Berlin for the sake of the stories, which he adored.”

A few days after the above entry in my diary of the time, we went to hear Lehmann and Vogl in the “Gotterdהmmerung.” The act in the wood where Siegfried was murdered was superb; the Death March and on to the end thrilled the marrow of one’s bones, giving a feeling of intense nervous sympathy. Surely there is no grander music than parts of that score, and Seidl rides through it like a conquering hero. People listened as if in a thrilling dream. Whereby it will be perceived that the musical education of at least a portion of the New York public had rapidly advanced.

One of the most picturesque and vivid of our visitors from over-sea was Laurence Oliphant, whom I met several times during his visits to New York, always coming away from a talk with him with a sense of mental refreshment and the influence of a truly original personality.

Page 298 CHAPTER XIV

AMONG notable public events after our first settling in New York, there was the riot of 1871, in which twenty-nine policemen and soldiers were killed and wounded, together with one hundred and four of their assailants, in the attack of Irish Catholics upon parading Orangemen. To me, so recently inured to war’s alarms, this affair did not seem more than a heavy skirmish, although it produced a great sensation in the town. Our many years of peace and happiness succeeding the turmoil and trials of early youth now set in, leaving our little family without a history. My husband had been recommended by Mr. Charles O’Conor to prefer charges before the judiciary committee of the Assembly at Albany against one of the most flagrant offenders among the corrupt judges of the Tweed rיgime who then disgraced the bench of the Superior Court of the city of New York. This he did with such vigor and conviction in opening the trial for the prosecution, in an argument lasting one day, followed by Messrs. John E. Parsons, Van Cott, and Stickney for the New York Bar Association, that the offender was promptly found guilty and removed from the bench.

The many kind words spoken of my husband by his brothers at the bar and in the public prints of the day, complimenting him upon this service to the public, were most gratifying to us both. A year later he left me alone with my small son to go as one of the commissioners of a company formed to follow up President Grant’s

Page 299 project to annex and develop the island of Santo Domingo, rejected by the Senate in 1870. The three envoys were Burton Harrison, Captain Samuel B. Samuels, and T. Scott Stewart, all of New York; sailing over wintry seas on the little steamer Tybee, a craft suspiciously uncertain in seaworthiness, and arriving at Santo Domingo after a stormy passage, to begin negotiations with President Bonaventura Baez of the Dominican republic for a commercial concession to their association styled the Samana Bay Company. The story of their adventures and reception by the suave if off-colored president, and the speedy promise of his agreement to their terms, made a picturesque chapter, and the commissioners returned to New York bearing their sheaves in triumph. The subsequent winter, that of 1873, was spent by Burton Harrison in London, where the commissioners dragged through long hours in the city, placing securities of the company whose banner seemed to be flying high; but in 1874, President Baez was deposed by one of the customary revolutions and the company fell to earth with him. Naught remained with us in result of our commissioners’ efforts save a box of wondrous sweetmeats, guava and limes wedding their luscious flavors, sent me with the compliments of the late president of the Dominican republic, and a case of wine presented by him to my husband, of which one or two bottles remain unopened in the family to this day as a souvenir of the affair.

It was during this absence in London that Mr. Harrison received tidings at Christmas of the birth of his second child, the news arriving by Atlantic cable - then also in infancy - in these terms: “Boy. Bothwell,” the two last words telescoped by the operator to the bewilderment of the recipient, who for some hours believed

Page 300 himself the proprietor of a son endowed with the title of Scott’s ferocious hero of song and story. This pseudonym went with the future congressman into school life, was signed to his prize essays at college, and continued to serve as a friendly alias whenever needed!

The possession of a strenuous young family compelling a remove from the apartment, we found a cheery, sunshine-haunted house at the corner of Lexington Avenue, a block beyond Gramercy Park, where we lived for many years. Within the high iron railings of Gramercy Park the children of that neighborhood, whose parents held keys to the square, were taken for their first airing, and grew up to vigorous boyhood. Many among them, now fathers of families of their own, look back with kindly affection upon the sports, tussles, and interchange of pledges of good-fellowship around the fountain and in the green arcades of that dear old enclosure.

One of my first callers in the new house was the venerable Mr. Samuel B. Ruggles, of Union Square, who told me that as a boy he used to roam over all the land in our neighborhood (the old Gramercy farm), and had often picked watercresses in a beautiful little silvery stream that flowed directly through our then cellar! Mr. Ruggles, a genial and accomplished gentleman, was also a far-seeing and public-spirited citizen. He it was who laid out and set aside Gramercy Park to be the perpetual possession of property-owners surrounding it, in order to tempt the erection of the handsome and substantial homes subsequently built there. Facing the square or near it, in our time, were the homes of Mr. James W. Gerard, Mr. Cyrus Field, Mr. David Dudley Field, Mr. John Bigelow, Mr. George Templeton Strong, Mr. William G. Hamilton, Mr. Cortlandt

Page 301 Palmer, Mr. Peter Cooper and his son-in-law, Mr. Abram Hewitt; Mr. Edward Cooper, Mlle. de Janon, and Mr. Samuel J. Tilden. When, in due time, a third son was added to our number, his eyes opened upon the glare of torches lighting up the entire neighborhood its house fronts, and rooms, as well as the trees in Gramercy Park, borne in the hands of a mighty procession of citizens on their march to congratulate Mr. Tilden upon his election to be President of the United States.

This fond belief of the Democrats, among whom my husband had been one of the ardent and prominent workers in Mr. Tilden’s behalf, died out with the smoke of the torches, and bitter disappointment with an undying conviction of their hero’s real success, remained to rankle in the unsuccessful party’s breast.

We often saw Mr. Tilden, who with the gentlemen enumerated above and their families, were our kindly neighbors. Mr. Peter Cooper, a well-beloved and honored figure in our midst, who had for old and young, gentle and simple, the same benignant smile and greeting, lived at the opposite corner from us. A commentary upon the universality of his charity was the naif remark of one of our children to a tramp hovering around our door-step. “Don’t come here, man. My father will scare you off! Go over to Mr. Cooper’s house. They all get something there!”

Perhaps the secret chronicle of Mr. Harrison’s givings, especially to the unending train of so-called Southern survivors of the Lost Cause that promenaded through his office, might have told a different tale! The number of needy “veterans of the Southern service,” who induced my husband and my brother to pay their way back to Dixie, reappearing directly after, in the thoroughfares of New York, was a formidable one. The

Page 302 argument of their victims offered in shame-faced excuse for having been so often taken in, was that it were better far to be mulcted now and then, than to let one fellow-countryman who needed a helping hand, go out unheeded into the chill environment of a great city’s streets.

In the summer of 1875, Burton Harrison was secretary and counsel of the first Rapid Transit Commission of the city of New York, appointed under the so-called Husted Act to consider the necessity of a system of rapid transit for New York, and if they could find such necessity to exist, to fix upon proper routes. Under the decision of this commission, of which Joseph Seligman was chairman, the elevated railways on Ninth, Sixth, Third, and Second Avenues were constructed and were for many years the main arteries of the town.

Mr. Harrison was also counsel for the Western Union Telegraph Company and the New York Telephone Company for many years, and was frequently heard in the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. He was one of the earliest members of the New York Bar Association and a member of several leading clubs. Thus, from the first, our lives were cast in busy but pleasant places, amid the hum and stir of current events in the great city of our adoption, even before I took up the professional ink-splashing which has filled so large a portion of my life.

The first venture of the kind I embarked upon in New York was at the instance of the Rev. Dr. Francis Vinton, of Trinity Church, who suggested to me the advisability of writing out a few stories of foreign experience that had amused him in recital. These he placed, signed by initials only, in one of the popular magazines.

It was later on, at the time of the Centennial Exhibition

Page 303 in Philadelphia, where “all the world was furbishing up ancestors and setting them on end, in company with Colonial teapots, queue-ties, rusty muskets, snuffboxes and paduasoys,” that it occurred to me to “open the strong-box of antiquity and abstract from there a charming little figure, who, like the ‘Bride of the Mistletoe Bough,’ had lain mouldering many a long year.”

The quaint little personage proved interesting to the public because of her intimate friendship with General Washington and the innocent wit of her childish chronicle. The appearance of “A Little Centennial Lady,” in Scribner’s Magazine, and the kind treatment it received from the critics, including the never-too-flattering Nation, emboldened me to go on. “Golden Rod,” reflecting our own experience in a summer journey to Bar Harbor with our children, was next published anonymously in Harper’s Weekly, and afterward in a little volume of the Half-Hour Series. From that time to the present I have been writing for my pleasure and to meet engagements made with editors.

I am afraid my promptitude in meeting literary engagements indicates the absence of the ear-marks of genius from an author. But certainly, the years spent in writing novels and tales published in Europe and America, plays, historical studies, and essays, special editorial articles by request on topics of the hour, etc., have given me much happiness and made for me friends both in my own country and abroad, where my work has often appeared in translations.

The first sorrow that came to our cheerful home in Lexington Avenue was the death of my mother while on a visit to us in the autumn of 1875.

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In a memorial pamphlet written at the time for private distribution, I poured the full flow of my appreciation of her almost perfect character. If she had faults, we knew them not. For high heroism and pure unselfishness, for exquisite sympathy with humanity and eager intellectuality combined, I have never known her equal; and for her children there were many long sad months before life seemed the same after she was snatched from them by sudden illness.

I spent a good part of the winter following in service as a visitor at Bellevue Hospital. What an extraordinary change it was to be almost daily seeing the reverse side of the tapestry of the rich and prosperous New York I had known hitherto. The trained-nurse system, which Bellevue afterward made famous, had not then been put into active operation. The visiting ladies, under Mrs. Osborne’s direction, had each a ward where they examined and reported to authority the conditions surrounding the patients.

A sharp contrast was presented between my attendance upon these waifs of the streets of a great cosmopolitan city, and the soldiers we had worked for in the South. A little story I wrote - which was translated afterward into other languages - grew out of a true incident of my Bellevue visiting. It was about an old French musician who played in Pasdeloup’s orchestra in Paris, and was noticed by the great violinist Joachim, for commendation. When he returned home after this supreme event, he found his only child, his daughter Gabrielle, fled in dishonor from his home. Following her to the New World, he saw and was repudiated by her from her carriage standing in the street. For a time he played as a member of the Philharmonic orchestra in New York, then, falling ill, lost his power over

Page 305 his bow, and drifted downward until he became a ward helper at Bellevue. There, one day, when asked to “lend a hand” in carrying out a dead body from one of the wards, a gust of wind blew the cloth from off her face, revealing that of his lost and beloved Gabrielle!

I, also, like so many preceding and succeeding women in New York, served my apprenticeship as a manager of the Nursery and Child’s Hospital Board, of which Mrs. Algernon Sydney Sullivan, a Virginian of executive ability and tact, was, and still is, the chairman. In company with Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, I went on tours of inspection of the institution and performed the other duties assigned to us. I mention these things to show acquaintance in detail with the practical working of some of the great charities of New York, which also gave me a correct idea of the mission fulfilled by many deemed worldlings by those who read of them only in newspapers as partakers of fashionable functions. There has been so much in the external aspect of modern New York society to tempt the novelist to wing light shafts of satire, I sometimes fear I have erred in this particular when it would have been as easy to call attention to the substantial acts of goodness and large beneficence which have never failed in response to demands from worthy objects.

In the spring of 1876 was organized at our home, by a number of women both patriotic and energetic, the Mount Vernon Aid Society, to assist in securing funds for much-needed repairs at Mount Vernon. Our board of managers soon possessed a list of influential names, and the advisory board fairly bristled with amiable dignitaries, including Governors Tilden, Morgan, and Dix, Mr. William Cullen Bryant, Mr. Schuyler, President

Page 306 F. A. P. Barnard, of Columbia, Mr. Ruggles, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, Mr. Charles A. Dana, Mr. George William Curtis, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, and Mr. S. L. M. Barlow.

This array of leaders, each and all of whom swore knightly oaths of fealty to the ladies who enlisted them, it was tacitly agreed among the managers were not to be called upon to appear otherwise than on paper, unless in extraordinary emergency, and we would do the rest.

In the first year was given by amateurs at the Union League Theatre an entertainment called the “Frog Opera,” the initial performance attended by the Empress of Brazil and her suite, then stopping modestly at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. To my husband’s lot fell the duty of escorting her Majesty, and sitting in attendance upon her all the evening, agreeably engaged in a conversation in insufficient French.

While putting her Majesty into the carriage after the performance, a gust of wind caught the good lady’s knitted head-covering and blew it along Twenty-sixth Street, my husband in hot pursuit for a much longer period than he quite approved of!

We were invited, in recognition of these courtesies, to a special audience with their Majesties, finding them a very kindly and simple-minded pair. The frogs, croaking successfully in their green doublets for three evenings, amassed a thousand dollars to send to Mount Vernon. The next year our society soared higher, taking the Academy of Music and massing one hundred amateurs upon the stage in “The Mistletoe Bough.” From this performance for two nights, we sent away four thousand dollars toward the endowment fund at Mount Vernon. In the third year of our existence we

Page 307 gave “The Sleeping Beauty,” a magnificent production of the old fairy tale in pantomime, put into acting shape by me in collaboration with Miss Ward, who took the leading part of the Princess. This was staged by Mr. Leon John Vincent, to the music of “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” It is always what cannot be told of great amateur entertainments that is most interesting, and we were not devoid of some of the usual spicy experiences between members of the corps dramatique and committees, and the mothers of gnomes and elves, each of whom demanded for her offspring the most conspicuous place in fairy-land. But as a whole we came through it in peace and good-will with each other, very proud of the substantial checks we forwarded to Mount Vernon.

Sometimes our zeal in contributing to popular funds overstepped itself, as in the case of “The Crescent and the Cross,” when the proceeds of a ball given by this organization were designed to be despatched in equal portions to Russian and Turkish sufferers from war. Preliminary meetings of the society were held under what the newspapers called “the highest auspices,” i. e., in mansions of Fifth Avenue never opened save to the elect of the fashionable world. It must be owned that some of these occasions witnessed stormy and irrelevant episodes, as when our chairwoman was arraigned by the head of one of her committees for saying that before the latter lady’s marriage to her solvent husband she had been poor and unknown, dressing very shabbily. The protesting dame wished to take this opportunity to say that everybody knew her ancestry, whereas that of her critic was uncertain, adding, to prove that Worth had equipped her in her unmarried state, she was prepared to show the receipted bills of the great faiseur. Tears bedewed the close of the meeting, but peace was

Page 308 finally restored. Unfortunately, the funds accruing from this enterprise were destined to benefit neither cross nor crescent, since the agent trusted with their distribution is said to have failed to materialize before either army; but for the truth of this I cannot vouch.

I entered into the movement for decorative household art handed on to us by the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The early days of that cult in New York were fostered by the Society of Decorative Art, embracing a number of women distinguished for refined taste and liberal opportunity for culture and observation. Mrs. Candace Wheeler, later the originator and presiding spirit of the Society of Associated Artists, lent her taste and executive ability to the beginnings of the Decorative Art Society. Mrs. Custer, the young widow of the heroic General Custer of the United States army, took, also, an active interest in its councils, and the association soon became a power in New York as well in directing household art as in providing for the sale of the work of gentlewomen that could not find its way into the general market. My contribution during the first year was a series of articles written for the Art Interchange, beginning as an organ for the society, later becoming a skilfully conducted art journal. These articles were collected and published by the Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, with additional text and many beautiful illustrations by leading artists, in a volume called “Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Homes.” The extent of my knowledge acquired by diligent study and seeing all the rare specimens of embroidery, needle-work, porcelain, and furnishings brought from abroad by private collectors as well as the best-known New York dealers, is to me now a matter of awesome surprise! I am certain I could not at the

Page 309 present date stand an examination on the contents of that book.

The wave swept on and over us, and under its impetus we had meetings at different houses to study stitches and fabrics; we committed to unoffending burlap and coarse crash marvels of crewel-work, to be ultimately consigned to the depths of cedar chests or given away to servants contemplating matrimony. I had, at my house, a class in china-painting taught by Mr. John Bennett, an English artist famed for a beautiful style of decorated faןence. We filled our homes with the evil odors of the pigments used, and with specimen plaques, which somehow did not in the least resemble Bennett’s, remaining to deck our highest shelves and haunt our futures with remorseful penitence.

Our annual delight was the journey to Lenox, where we early contracted the habit of going in summer-time, and settling down there for three months, first in a tiny cottage on the village street, and later in a pleasant and more conventional home. Dr. Holmes once told me we had chosen wisely to give our children such surroundings in their earliest youth, as Lenox, and afterward Bar Harbor. He said: “It is impossible that such beauty of landscape should not leave its color on young lives.” He then talked affectionately of the days of his own youth in Berkshire, when he helped his father to plant trees around their home at Pittsfield, his father holding up the tree in the hole prepared for it, whilst he shovelled in the earth. “Those are great trees now,” he added, with a sigh, “in the prime of life, while I - ! But it was a joy to me I never have forgotten!”

It is hard to say which is the more beautiful season at Lenox: the early summer, when the woods gleam with the pinky white of mountain laurel, and the fields

Page 310 are a solid mass of buttercups and daisies growing knee-high and rippled by the wind, or in autumn, when one might drive for miles daily, during a month at least, through illuminated forest glades and glorious uplands, and each day find a new charm of color, scenery, and atmosphere differently brought together. Speaking of ox-eyed daisies, the farmer is not the only one who finds them a pest rather than a beauty in his fields. Monsignor Doane, whom we met at the Robert Olivers’ merry tea-table, where wit always flew like thistle-down, told, apropos of my corsage bouquet of field daisies, each with its golden heart, a story of Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, who in one of his walks came upon a student of the university gathering a bunch of them. “What’ll you want of those, man?” asked the professor. “Oh! I’m getting them for my mother, sir, who is an invalid.” “Then it’s a tay she’ll be making of them, for sure,” remarked the president, passing on.

When we first went to Lenox, the lovely hill village had not parted with its old-time characteristics of unpretending hospitality. The people who met there, summer after summer, were of the cultured and refined class of American society, knowing each other intimately, and satisfied to exchange simple entertainments in their pretty, picturesque homes. We had tea-parties followed by games of twenty questions, by charades, and dumb crambo, where fun and wit were the order of the hour. We walked to and from each other’s houses, attended by maids with lanterns. Every Saturday evening there was a gathering at Sedgwick Hall, for dancing and reunion, to which the new-rich magnates of New York came as total strangers. Young men called for young women to walk to the ledge in the Woolsey woods, whither they were seen wending their

Page 311 way, with a cashmere shawl upon the gentleman’s arm for the lady to sit upon, and a blue-and-gold volume of some favorite poet in his hand, from which to read selected passages, under dropping nuts in an amber atmosphere. People met at the post-office after church on Sunday, when the elm-shaded street became alive with gay faces and graceful figures with attendant cavaliers. On Sunday afternoons we walked up to see Mr. Goodman’s cows. In the rocking-chairs of the Curtis piazzas were discussed all sorts of current subjects, from stocks to horses, from domestic to foreign politics, resumed later by the male participants at the Club in the village street.

I lived there long enough to see a mighty change. The rural hill-sides and pastures, bought up at fabulous prices, were made the sites of modern villas, most of them handsome and in good taste. The villas were succeeded by little palaces, some repeating the facades and gardens of royal dwellings abroad. Instead of the trim maid-servants appearing in caps and aprons to open doors, one was confronted by lackeys in livery lounging in the halls. Caviare and mousse aux truffes supplanted muffins and waffles. Worth and Callot gowns, cut low and worn with abundant jewels, took the place of dainty muslins made by a little day dressmaker. Stables were filled with costly horses, farmyards with stock bearing pedigrees sometimes longer than that of the owner; the dinner-hour moved on to eight o’clock, and lastly came house-parties, “weekends,” and the eternal honk and reek of the motorcar. An early resident tells me mournfully that all the enchanting wood roads of my early memories are now oiled for automobiles, the scent quite overpowering that of uncrumpling ferns and dewy moss as the

Page 312 smoke-breathing monsters tear through these haunts of ancient peace.

But happily a great many of the old habituיs of Lenox still resort to their former summer homes, and society there retains more of the well-bred ease that comes from continuity of common interest in a familiar spot, than is perhaps to be seen elsewhere in America.

In Lenox I wrote for my sons two volumes of fairy tales which have had an existence prolonged beyond my hope for them. One of these, called “The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book,” was illustrated by my friend Miss Rosina Emmet, who came to visit me ostensibly that we might work on it together. We set off one afternoon in my phaeton drawn by Bishop’s mare, a tranquil steed warranted to stand till doomsday if her nose were pointed toward a tuft of foliage. Somewhere on the Lebanon road we halted, tied Bishop, and wandered through the woods till we came out upon a ledge having a glorious view of distant mountains, verdant intervales, and winding river. Each of us sat with pad on knee, pencil in hand, back against a tree, rapt in the beauty of the scene.

“What’s it to be called?” finally said the artist, desperately rousing herself from dolce far niente.

“Oh! I don’t know,” was the author’s lazy answer; “say ‘The Ogress and - the Ogress and the Cook.’ That’ll do as well as anything.”

“What did the ogress do, and what had the cook to do with her?”

“Haven’t the least idea …. Oh! I’ll tell you. Have her a quite beautiful little cook, a cottage maiden, sitting at her door, with the ogress in disguise as a poor old woman coming to ask for food. After that something will turn up.”

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The result in Miss Emmet’s case was a charming little vignette. The second fairy-book, entitled, in America, “Bric-א-Brac Tales,” in England, “Folk and Fairy Tales,” was illustrated by Walter Crane with all his well-known taste and skill, and the two volumes are to-day in the hands of the children of those for whom they were penned at Lenox.

Miss Emma Lazarus, the brilliant young poet, who wrote “The Banner of the Jew” and other spirited verse embodying championship of her race, was also my guest at Lenox, and sometimes in our drives talk became so earnest that we would find ourselves halted in some grassy wayside nook, the mare’s head bent down to crop rich clover, while we discussed points of mutual interest. Miss Lazarus was the most feminine of women, but her eager spirit seemed to burn like an unfailing lamp, and she could not treat life with banality, even in trivial questions. I have several letters from her reverting to this “happy visit” in our home. She wrote later, at my solicitation, the stanzas entitled “The New Colossus,” as her contribution to an album I brought together to be sold for the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund, which I will here insert:

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame

With conquering limbs astride from land to land.

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman, with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she

With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;

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The wretched refuse of your teeming shore -

Send these, the nameless, tempest-tossed, to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

The circumstances under which these lines were written were as follows: Miss Lazarus was calling upon me when I begged her to write something for my “Portfolio.” She declared she could think of nothing suitable, was mutinous and inclined to be sarcastic, when I reminded her of her visits to the Russian and other refugees at Ward’s Island, the newly arrived immigrants whose sad lot had so often excited her sympathy. At once her brow cleared, her eye lightened. She became gentle and tender in a moment, and, going away, soon after sent me “The New Colossus,” printed in the official catalogue of a loan collection for the same fund, and widely copied and extolled.

The suggestions of this great loan collection at the Academy of Design, from which Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith as director was able to turn over to the pedestal committee the substantial sum of upward of fourteen thousand dollars, came originally from Mr. Montague Marks, editor of the Art Amateur, whose letter outlining the scheme I have just reread. By asking persons whom previous experience had taught me would serve both as workers and leaders in such a movement to come to my house for discussion of it, the project was set afloat. Afterward it expanded into a vast and wide-spreading enterprise, to which a large number of influential private citizens as well as a long list of “litterateurs,” artists, collectors, and experts lent their aid.

Personally speaking, Bartholdi’s monument came very near to being mine. For several weeks I worked continuously both as head of the ladies’ committee on

Page 315 china, jewelry, costumes, miniatures, lace, embroidery, and fans; on the “Portfolio,” sold ultimately to Mr. Lydig Suydam for fifteen hundred dollars; on the executive committee, and in writing the introduction to the official catalogue brought together by Mr. A. W. Drake. After it was over my husband satirically requested me to oblige him by retiring for a while from public works. He also said the dainty medallion made of the metal of the statue, with a golden coating, and sent to me by M. Bartholdi from Paris, accompanied by the sculptor’s thanks and “hommages respectueux” did not entirely requite our household for the wear and tear of its domestic peace.

Already the aspect of New York social life had begun to show tokens of coming radical changes. The lines of the old rיgime revealed a certain elasticity toward families previously excluded. It is curious to recall patronizing sayings, that have stuck in memory, by conservatives of the old school concerning some of those who have since pushed them to the wall and stand before modern eyes as symbols of the high aristocracy of the metropolis. For my own part, I could never see that these arbitrary distinctions of our society, the shutting out of one family and snatching another to its bosom, had any raison d’ךtre in a republic. The enormous influx of outside wealth brought to New York by after-the-war prosperity, started the fashion of huge dinners given at Delmonico’s and elsewhere, where splendor of decoration and extravagance of food and wines flashed like electric light before the eyes of old-time entertainers. To wonder at these novelties was to go and enjoy them. Mrs. Potiphar and Mrs. Gnu, of Mr. Curtis’s satiric chronicle, were soon left behind in the race, though we were still

Page 316 reminded of these characters at receptions given in plain Fifth Avenue establishments with brown-stone fronts and rather dreadful picture-galleries, where, in a glare of gas-light, we were jostled by hundreds of people standing around supper-tables, from which floated searching odors of fried oysters served with mounds of chicken salad, and accompanied by champagne that flowed like water. This ceremony accomplished, and a tour of the rooms made, there was really nothing left to do but to begin the mad rush through the upstairs dressing-rooms in search of coats and hats and take one’s leave.

Generally, the “social events” in question were presided over, on the door-step, under the canvas awning, by Brown, whose gruff tones in calling and despatching carriages mingle with all such recollections of that day. His function, when off church duty, was that (wittily applied to his son-in-law and successor) of “the connecting link between society and the curb-stone.” Possessed of native humor and an aggressive spirit, Brown became in time very lawless in his methods with his employers; always inclined, however, to temper justice with mercy in the case of his earlier patrons, the old families, whom he considered actually of first importance. I remember driving with one of these ladies to a reception at a fine new house where Brown stood near the carriage door, and greeted us. “Many people here, Brown?” asked my friend casually.

“Too many,” was the answer in a sepulchral tone tinged with melancholy. “If you ladies will take my advice, you’ll go on to Mrs. –‘s. This is mixed, very!”

Once, when we were entering Grace Church to go to our pew for Sunday morning service, we passed,

Page 317 kneeling in the aisle near the door, his head bent in prayer and crossing himself devoutly, an Italian laborer in rough garb who had strayed in from Broadway, all unconscious of alien faith, to make his devotions. His feet, extending behind him, were of extraordinary size, clad in cow-skin boots of formidable thickness. Brown, nudging my husband in the arm, said in a hoarse whisper, with a glance at these appendages: “Them’s beetle-crushers!”

But he did not interfere with the suppliant until his prayers were done!

A visiting clergyman who was to occupy the pulpit of Grace Church on a Sunday afternoon consulted Brown as to the usual length of the sermon on such occasions.

“Well, I should say, sir,” said the despot, looking the stranger over with a cool and critical gaze, “you’d better make it twenty minutes; our people won’t stand much more.”

When we were seeking a house for ourselves, upon leaving the apartment, Brown visited my husband in his office to offer him his own dwelling, which he was anxious to rent.

“I can only tell you, Colonel Harrison,” he said, with entire solemnity, “that it suits me exactly. It’s a perfect bejoo.”

We did not avail ourselves of this privilege, and I never heard who occupied the bijou, which I have no doubt was a comfortable residence. Brown’s peculiar relation to things social, and his intelligence and judgment about people, caused the wits of the time to attribute to him the possession of a list of “dancing young men,” of respectable connections, upon which hostesses not well established in New York would draw for the

Page 318 uses of their balls. But of the existence of the so-called “Brown’s brigade” I am not qualified to speak. The man was certainly an unique figure in the middle-age of New York, who, although his functions have since been ably filled by members of his family, could not be seen again in its present vast community.

Somewhere in the seventies appeared, and was received in good houses, a certain “Count Henri de Tourville,” who, for a season, disported himself as a French nobleman of wealth and distinction. Such an event would be impossible now, since not only is the world much smaller, but people are wary and do not as a rule shed hospitality broadcast upon adventurers. Together with a large number of our friends, I attended a famous dinner at Delmonico’s, given by the count, of which the wonders of live singing birds in branches suspended over the tables, a lake in the centre with (drugged) live swans, and masses of gorgeous flowers everywhere remain in memory. My husband, who was in Europe on business at the time, took care to say, when the sequel came, that, had he been at home, his wife would not have been numbered among the guests. But all the same his wife had many companions in misfortune when, later on, we heard of our florid and resplendent host’s subsequent adventures. De Tourville, proceeding from New York to London, there wooed and won a wealthy but homely bride, took her on a honey-moon journey to the Tyrol, and, after a fierce quarrel, ended by pushing her over a precipice, at the foot of which she was found dead by the people of their hotel. Tried for her murder, De Tourville was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a gloomy fortress in Germany, where, long years afterward, I read in a foreign journal, he was still living, incarcerated.

Page 319 Whether he was a “real count” or not I never heard, but, although the aristocracy are perhaps in nowise superior to commoners in the matter of getting rid of inconvenient life partners, I have always had my suspicions about his title since the day I partook of the “Comte” de Tourville’s bread and salt at the Delmonico banquet.

Were we simpler-minded in those far-off days, that an evening at the play was an “event,” from which we came away happier and more healthily excited than from the melancholy, morbid dramas of the present? To the then Fifth Avenue Theatre, upon the site of old Apollo Hall, for four years under the direction of Augustin Daly, until it burned down in 1881, we went to applaud beautiful Mary Anderson in her statuesque poses, the youthful Modjeska in her lovely and stirring impersonations, and later on the wholesome and joyous diversion of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado.”

On the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue arose the fine Renaissance structure of Booth’s Theatre, which we considered the last word in luxury and elegance as a playhouse. Out of mists like those that wreathed the Brocken, I seem to see arising successively Booth and Barrett in “Julius Cזsar”; exquisite Adelaide Neilson leaning from Juliet’s balcony to be wooed by handsome Harry Montague; George Ringgold superbly sitting Henry V’s battle-charger, surrounded by a victorious army mingling lances and banners around his manly form; Sarah Bernhardt, slim and silver-voiced, as Doסa Sol, weaving spells around Hernani - and again as Adrienne Lecouvreur; noble Edwin Booth over and again in all his varied rפles - surely we have nothing better in this present year of grace!

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And don’t I remember, earlier still, going to the Fourteenth Street Theatre, once called the Thיגtre Franחais, to sit spellbound while Adelaide Ristori swept across the stage as Marie Stuart or gazed at us with the woe-smitten eyes of Marie Antoinette on her way to execution? There, too, we saw Fechter sustain, with irresistible verve, the parts in his romantic dramas that stirred the blood from start to finish of the play. There, too, La Grande Duchesse first strutted and rollicked on the American stage, and merry, audacious, captivating Tostיe appeared in “La Belle Hיlטne” –!

And Wallack’s Theatre, at Broadway and Thirteenth Street, after 1883 known as The Star! What a splendid company trod its boards for a score of years! Fisher, Smith, Gilbert, Sefton, Davenport, Stoddart, Boucicault, Coghlan, Lester Wallack above all, in the standard dramas and interesting plays now vanished into the limbo of lost things along with their genial interpreters. There it was that Henry Irving made his American dיbut as Matthias in “The Bells,” in 1883, appearing afterward in the rose-and-gold brocade dressing-gown of Doricourt in “The Belle’s Stratagem.”

Next in favor was the Union Square, where the tear-bedewed “Two Orphans” and “Miss Multon” ran their unending course with gifted Clara Morris, and Mansfield in “A Parisian Romance” never failed to satisfy the crowds.

In Palmer’s Theatre, at Broadway and Thirtieth Street, the bright star of Lester Wallack arose again to sparkle with undiminished vigor; and what would not one give now for a ticket to see “The School for Scandal” with the same eyes that looked upon the performance of 1882, when Gilbert, Edwards, Tearle, Gerald Eyre, Rose Coghlan, Madame Ponisi, and Stella

Page 321 Boniface carried the old comedy to a triumphant finish night after night?

There, also, Salvini as Samson, and Richard Mansfield as Richard III, and for a while Coquelin and Hading, reigned supreme in the attractions of the town.

To Daly’s many people pinned their faith as the chief theatre for refined audiences to go to with a surety of always meeting the best players in the best plays. One need no more than recall its exquisite presentments of Shakespearian comedies and successful adaptations from foreign sources by Augustin Daly, into which the talent of Miss Rehan and Mr. Drew threw vivid life. All middle-aged New York remembers and was proud of them!

I recall a performance of “The Critic” somewhere, which kept the audience in a ripple of incessant laughter occasionally merging into a roar. Who laughs in that way now? And how we went from one normal emotion to another while Boucicault played in the “Shaughraun”! And who wasn’t made brighter and cheerfuller for the next day’s toil of life for listening to one of Robertson’s comedies, just as, later on, we felt after Pinero’s “Sweet Lavender” at Mr. Frohman’s Lyceum Theatre?

Yes, I maintain it, theatre-going was a better business then, better for the nerves, the spirits, and the digestion, than now, when problem plays and analyses of degenerate character send us home dejected to our beds. And oh! for Gilbert and Sullivan, in lieu of some of these boneless, fibreless “musical comedies” where masculine horse-play alternates with the gymnastics of prancing females, and the music tinkles on and on, touching never a chord of human feeling!

It has often struck me with a certain surprise that

Page 322 with all the good, refined, and estimable women we have seen upon our stage in New York there has been so little seen of them, comparatively speaking, in the life of our drawing-rooms, unlike London, where the actress of character and position is cordially welcomed everywhere. But New York has shown little of the catholicity and independence of London concerning the relation of all arts to society. It has been suggested that old New York was too puritanical, modern New York is too uncertain of itself. In recalling the queens of the stage whom one has heard of, or met at the private functions of so-called high society in America, the chief among them in by-gone years seem to be Mrs. Frances Kemble Butler and Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. Mrs. Butler had been the honored guest of half the aristocracy of England before she married a Georgian gentleman and came to the States to divide her days between staid Philadelphia, what she considered the barbarism of a rice plantation full of slaves, and the more congenial atmosphere of Lenox, where she owned a house.

Lenox, when I first went there, was full of stories of this brilliant, masterful lady (who wrote of herself, “You know, my dear, suddenness is the curse of my nature”) both in her own abode and as a frequenter of Curtis’s Hotel, described by her as “having a sort of blossoming season with sweet handsome young faces shining about it in every direction” - a condition of things continuing to the present day!

Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, of a good old family of New York, married Mr. Ritchie, of Richmond, where I, when a schoolgirl, visited her in a quaint little cottage sort of house set in a green garden, and she excited my imagination by reciting Shakespeare beautifully and

Page 323 telling me delightful stories of her life upon the stage. She made quite a favorite of me, and I thought her fascinating, but I had, even then, an idea that she was not happy settled down as a wife and housekeeper, and that one could not serve the two masters, Art and Domesticity.

Adelaide Ristori was the heroine of the hour in my first days in New York. I saw her first in “Marie Antoinette,” and in her other rפles later, and her extraordinary talent on the stage, joined to her all-pervading common-sense and love of her family, rather disproved my conception expressed above. She was about fifty when she came to America, and looked very much younger. As the Marchioness del Grillo Capricani she was invited a great deal to the best houses. At one of the Roosevelt balls Madame Ristori, beautifully gowned, sat in the cotillon, and danced whenever taken out.

Sarah Bernhardt I never met socially. When she played Doסa Sol in “Hernani,” at Booth’s Theatre, she was quite painfully thin and far from beautiful. (“A Dog and His Bone” was the name given by some French wit to her portrait in the Salon in which was introduced that of her canine pet of the hour.) But when one heard her voice of gold in Victor Hugo’s ringing verse, one criticised nothing, but simply bowed down before her genius.

Adelina Patti had been in her youth, in the South and elsewhere in America, a darling of the social world. When she returned here after her separation from her first husband, the Marquis de Caux, the dandy equerry and cotillon leader of the Tuileries, and was known to have formed a new alliance with Nicolini, the tenor singer, whose wife still lived, New York, which rarely

Page 324 condones an offence of this variety, failed to invite or receive in private the world-famed diva.

Christine Nilsson, as I have said, was, when a young woman, rapturously sought by entertainers. She was the centre of a group of girls and youthful matrons who haunted her rooms at her hotel, and could not make enough of the exquisite Mignon and Marguerite of the Academy of Music performances.

Miss Clara Louise Kellogg, a most lovely singer, was also much fךted in New York drawing-rooms. Parepa-Rosa, large, stately, and dignified, attended by her diminutive husband, Carl Rosa, the eminent violinist, commanded always a place in the homes of those who applauded her on the stage.

Madame Modjeska, as noble-looking and full of gracious womanhood behind the scenes as before them, we met first at the house of our friends the Richard Watson Gilders, where on their Friday evenings at home one was always sure to encounter the “dessus du panier” of the literary and artistic world. There, also, I first heard Adטle aus der Ohe witch magic music from piano keys!

I find, in my correspondence, notes from Modjeska and Count Bozenta concerning letters of introduction we had offered to give them in New Orleans, where she charmed those who encountered her in private life to the full as much as when they sat spellbound before her lovely impersonations.

I first met Ellen Terry at the house of Mr. Parke Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant, at an evening party. Miss Terry was simply radiant in face and voice and manner, an irresistible being on the stage and off of it. Mrs. Lemoyne had just recited for Irving and herself the spirited poem of “Kentucky

Page 325 Belle,” Miss Terry yielding to her the tribute of a gentle rain of tears. One reads of a certain Miss Sophy Streatfield, a friend of Dr. Johnson’s, to whom her friends would say, “Cry, pretty Sophy, cry,” when she immediately responded by an overflow of weeping in which she looked prettier than before. Miss Terry must have been the only other living person to whom tears were becoming.

We were sitting apart, a little group of women, of whom one cried out, “Oh! I am ashamed of myself. I have such a bad habit - that of sitting on my foot!”

“Have you?” cried Miss Terry joyously. “I’ve always done so, and often on the stage. It lends one such height and dignity; don’t you think so? And as to not being able to manage it gracefully, just see here!” And she rose and resettled herself with the perfect ease and distinction of a swan returning to its nest, amid laughing applause from us.

One more souvenir of Miss Terry of a later date. In 1903, when Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske had in rehearsal a play of mine, “The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch,” at Mr. Fiske’s Manhattan Theatre, I was startled by her bringing Miss Terry into the box, where I sat alone in the gloom of the big empty playhouse, to look on with me at the progress of affairs. I felt sure that the famous actress would be horribly bored, and was assailed by many fears. But the clever band of ladies and gentlemen whom I was fortunate enough to have as interpreters of my “Drama of Every Day” must have had some idea of the presence of their distinguished auditor, and did their best to carry off the monotony of a rehearsal, which Miss Terry followed with a patience, courtesy, and lightning-like intelligence of apprehension astonishing to me. In one scene where

Page 326 a number of young girls hover around the wedding-gifts of a bride to be, she clapped her hands, exclaiming, “That’s pretty, pretty! They’re like a flock of butterflies.”

Mrs. Fiske’s part she, of course, commended as it deserved, for absolute naturalness and convincing simplicity, underlaid with the great artist’s true skill and knowledge. Miss Terry said that day she had just refused Sir Henry Irving’s request for her to play Marguerite in his revival of “Faust.” “I told him to think of our combined ages in an attempt to render this interpretation of the passions of glowing youth!” Her laughter rang out so merrily, her appearance and manner were so charmingly girlish, it was hard to accept her version of the reason for her decision.

Mrs. Fiske, in her dignity of character, high devotion to her art, and ruling intellectuality, could always have claimed and held any place she desired in the better society of New York. But there was never a moment, save during her periods of country rest, when her life was not given over to study of her parts and discussion of the various productions in her husband’s theatres and elsewhere. My intercourse with her during the preliminaries of the play mentioned, which she gave at the Manhattan during the winter season of 1901-02, and carried afterward on tour, was uniformly agreeable and illumining. I shall never forget those mornings, in my own library or in her dressing-room at the theatre (a dainty place, indicative of its owner’s refined nature, utterly foreign to my preconceived ideas), going over the play step by step, she reading, I interrupting with requests to “stop just there, please.” “We’ll leave out half that speech,” etc., etc. Once, when we had extensively blue-pencilled a scene,

Page 327 Mrs. Fiske looked at me with a merry smile, saying: “The Lord loveth a cheerful cutter!”

She introduced me to the mystery of “club sandwiches,” which, with tea, were brought in from a neighboring restaurant, serving us for luncheon after hours of strenuous work. Her notes to me during this time were charming, with a distinct literary flavor, touching upon authors and playwrights in many countries, and themes other than those of our common interests. I have always wished that Mrs. Fiske had given us in her repertoire more pure comedy, for which I am sure she possesses as high a gift as for the emotional roles and analytical studies of woman’s nature she has made renowned.

Miss Georgia Cayvan, of the Lyceum Theatre, was a charming, frank young woman whose talent as an actress delighted many audiences. Once, when conducting an amateur performance for charity of Octave Feuillet’s “Portraits of the Marquise” at the Madison Square Theatre, lent to us for the purpose by its proprietors, the Rev. Dr. Mallory, and his brother, Mr. Marshall Mallory, one of the usual calamities of such enterprises overtook me. At the eleventh hour, Miss Justine Ingersoll, of New Haven, who was to play Lisette, a waiting-maid with a small but sprightly part, had to withdraw, owing to the death of a relative. In despair I appealed to Mr. Daniel Frohman to come to my assistance, and to my surprise Miss Cayvan volunteered to fill the part. She came among us with much simplicity and grace, played Lisette at two matinees, refused all emolument for her services, and said she was amply repaid by the remembrance of “that brief happy little time when I was an amateur!” Her sad fate in being overtaken by insanity in the full flush of her

Page 328 career, dying soon after in a sanitarium, will be remembered and deplored. The little play in which Miss Cayvan assisted was a powder-and-puff comedy, written by Feuillet for the Empress Eugיnie’s private theatricals at Compiטgne, in which her majesty took the leading woman’s part. After using my translation several times for charity, I sent some newspaper notices of the performances to the author, with explanations, receiving in return the following note:

“MADAME: I am deeply touched by your kind letter, and have read with interest the newspaper cuttings you were good enough to add. I am very happy that my works - even the lightest among them - should be received with such gracious welcome in your great country by the יlite of American society. You will add greatly to my gratitude, madame, by consenting to send me a copy of your translation of ‘The Portraits of the Marquise.’ Accept I beg of you, with my cordial thanks, the homage of my respectful and sympathetic devotion. “OCTAVE FEUILLET. “Paris, December 7, 1883. “Rue de Tourneau, 8.”

Of course I sent my translation, but equally “of course” I was sure the gallant author never read it.

My strong bias toward the stage and all belonging to it, although kept in check by circumstance, could not resist dalliance with plays, mostly adaptations and translations from French originals, sayinטtes and monologues, given by both amateurs and professionals all over the country. In justification of my work in this direction, I may venture, perhaps, to quote from the

Page 329 notice of my “Short Comedies,” gathered into a volume, in one of the critical journals of the day:

“How many persons can touch and translate a French comedy without extracting from it its perfume, its gaiety, its trembling accent of vitality, its volatile essences and airinesses. Here she is particularly skilful. In the five brief comedies before us, she has laid the lightest hand imaginable on the French originals, and whisked them into English as deftly as a French cook turns an omelette. If one must ‘adapt’ and ‘arrange,’ it is to be hoped that it will be in such ‘harmonies’ and ‘nocturnes’ as these, which are Whistler-like in their dexterity of touch and color, and mirth-provoking in their keenness and fun.”

The most ambitious of my attempts in this direction had been a two-act comedy from the French of Scribe and Legouvי, put into English with rather a free hand, scattered with phrases and speeches of my own as well as quaint Russian proverbs culled from many sources. This version, first given by amateurs for a local charity at Sedgwick Hall, in Lenox, was interpreted by Mrs. James Brown Potter, Mrs. Walter Scott Andrews, Miss Craven, Mr. Henry Chauncey, Mr. Alexander Mason, Mr. Andrews, and an assortment of good-looking and too-well-dressed Russian peasants drawn from the ranks of society around us.

Stopping at our house as guests, to remain over the performance, were the star, Mrs. Potter, and her little girl, and Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. The day of the performance it was discovered by the stage-manager that we had no “snow” for the scene in which Poleska makes her appearance in Ivan’s hut, and all of my house-party forthwith set to work helping to cut strips of paper into the requisite small particles to be

Page 330 shed from above the stage, and a merry task we made of it.

The little play took our audience promptly, and was repeated, for charity, at the Madison Square Theatre in New York, after we all went back to town.

Mr. Marshall Mallory came to see me, proposing to me to enlarge the play to three acts for the professional stage. I did my best with it, and “A Russian Honeymoon” was accordingly put into rehearsal by the Madison Square Company, and brought out in the spring with beautiful scenery and costumes. In the cast were Mrs. Agnes Booth, as Poleska; Miss Ada Dyas, as the Baroness; Miss Estelle Clayton, as Micheline; Mr. Frederick Bryton, as Alexis; Mr. William J. Lemoyne, who made a remarkable character sketch of the part of Ivan the Cobbler; and Mr. Max Freeman, a most clever Koulikoff, with Mr. Edwin Arden as Osip.

The occasion was noted as being the first time when any flash-light picture of the stage was taken, at midnight, following the performance, and Mr. Daniel Frohman, the manager of the theatre, was seen as one of the guards crossing bayonets to keep the fond Alexis from returning to his Poleska.

While we were preparing this piece for the stage, I had spent much time in the Historical and other libraries looking up Russian prints, and reading translations of Russian books. For a wedding procession with which Mr. David Belasco, then stage-manager of the Madison Square Theatre, designed to adorn the opening scene, I found what I took to be a very quaint and characteristic wedding veil hung from a framework extending around the bride’s head, of which I made a sketch and submitted it without having the legend underneath the print translated. We found out that this was a mosquito

Page 331 net worn in some of the northerly districts of Russia, in time to save ourselves from decorating with it the peasant bride in our play. When my husband, my son, and I were once walking from a railway station in the land of the midnight sun, where we had found no vehicle, we encountered a band of “summer boarders,” wearing these curious appliances, and I fell into laughter at thought of our “Russian Honeymoon,” but in the dense cloud of mosquitoes that swarmed around us soon realized the need of this accessory.

As the time drew near for the production of my first piece by professionals, my whole thoughts were naturally absorbed by it. The season being Lent, I resolved to punish myself by extra attendance at weekday services, during which I would try to put the Madison Square Theatre and all its works resolutely out of my mind. Alas! when for this purpose I took possession of our pew in Calvary Church, I heard “Dearly beloved brethren” in a familiar voice, and there in the reading-desk was the Rev. Dr. Mallory, with whom, in his brother’s office at the theatre the day before, I had been consulting long and earnestly about the play! Dr. Mallory was also the editor of the Churchman, and a very able exponent, in print, of diocesan affairs.

I found my relations with Mrs. Booth very pleasant, although confined altogether to our meetings at rehearsal. I admired and respected her as an artist of real ability. Miss Dyas, more of a woman of the world, and always a charming actress, had been engaged by the management to fill the part of the world-weary, capricious, yet good-hearted Baronne, which she did to perfection.

That little play, “A Russian Honeymoon,” proved to

Page 332 be an extraordinary money-getter, given with my permission, by amateurs all over the country for local charities. After its professional run at the Madison Square Theatre, it was taken on a six weeks’ tour through New England by professionals. Reproduced by our New York amateurs at the Madison Square for the Rev. Dr. Rainsford’s Boys’ Club of St. George’s Church, the play may have been said to have had the benefit of clergy from start to finish.

Mrs. Brown Potter, then in the height of her remarkable beauty and personal charm, was the Poleska, Mrs. Walter Scott Andrews, an ‘almost professional’ Baronne, Mr. Edward Fales Coward, our cleverest amateur, the Alexis, Mr. Prescott Hall Butler, the Koulikoff, and Mr. Bedlow, of Newport, the Ivan.

Played again in Brooklyn, in February, 1886, it appeared at the National Theatre, in Washington, for the Mount Vernon Endowment Fund. I was then the guest of Mrs. Macalester Laughton, one of the regents of Mount Vernon, and Mrs. Potter visited Mr. and Mrs. William C. Whitney, while nothing could exceed the hospitality of Washington in general to our amateur Thespians.

Mrs. Leiter gave for me a large luncheon, at which Miss Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, then lady of the White House, was present, and many another political and diplomatic star in feminine society.

After this the little piece kept on appearing at intervals in all sorts of unexpected places. Colleges, schools, amateur clubs everywhere asked for it, and it rolled in money for charities at quite a tremendous rate.

Omitting the royalties of “A Russian Honeymoon” paid to me for its professional performances, and including those of other plays and entertainments personally

Page 333 devised and carried out under my direction, I had the pleasure of distributing to worthy funds and charities, during that time of enthusiasm and energy in dramatic undertaking, the sum of thirty-two thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. And what I think more entitled to be written down was that our amateurs held harmoniously together, putting honest hard work, and in some cases distinct talent, into their endeavors, producing on the whole entertainments that would have been creditable to the stage in the Rosina Vokes style of light and graceful comedy. The newspapers took us quite seriously, giving capital notices as a rule. It is, however, due to Mr. David Belasco to say that the largest portion of our success was owing to his training and extraordinary skill in devising pictures and effects from material that lent itself readily to lovely grouping and vivid color.

One of the memorable occasions when this order was reversed and the stage invaded society was the meeting of the Thursday Evening Club at Mrs. C. Vanderbilt’s, where the Coquelins, pטre et fils, were the attraction. There was a great gathering of eager people, the streets blocked with carriages in line for some distance from the house. The first choice of the great Coquelin for his programme was Daudet’s exquisite “Monsieur le Sous Prיfet aux champs,” from “Lettres de Mon Moulin” (of which I had made a rhythmical version in English a year before, and sent it to the Evening Post, the editor writing me they would publish it with pleasure; but I never saw it more). Every line of the original is as dainty and delicate as maidenhair fern, and it has the same odor of the woods. Coquelin recited it, con amore, giving next “Le Naufragי,” a harrowing tale of a shipwrecked man alone on a raft with

Page 334 his dog, who goes mad, so that the master is forced to kill his only comrade. Farcical monologues followed; excellent fooling in the funeral oration pronounced upon his spouse by “Monsieur Bourgeois,” who, from weeping, passes through every stage of mitigated woe into the broad arena of rejoicing in freedom and the opening paradise of a vie de garחon. Next we had a take-off of an English tourist in Paris; and then the piece of resistance of the evening - a scene from the “Mariage Forcי” of Moliטre between the two Coquelins.

Here the imprisoned genius of pure comedy burst its bonds and soared away over the heads of the jewelled conventional crowd of not all understanding people. I sat near enough not to lose a fleeting shadow or a glimpsing light upon the grotesque mask and to catch every syllable of his speech. On that tiny stage in the Vanderbilt ballroom, he was like a giant sporting alone upon a little hill.

A day or two later I met the great mime at an afternoon party in Miss Elisabeth Bisland’s flat, where, amid red roses stuck everywhere into blue jars, a handful of appreciative people gathered at the bidding of the clever, tactful young hostess. (There it was on another day that I met, for the only time, the man who has put the very soul of Japan into glowing English prose - Lafcadio Hearn!) The Lemoynes, gifted husband and gifted wife, came in, and Mr. John Drew, of Daly’s Theatre. Mrs. Pemberton Hincks, of New Orleans, sang the best of her Crיole songs, then Sarah Lemoyne recited her inimitable “Mrs. Maloney on the Chinese Question.” Coquelin, squeezed between me and another woman on a little sofa, encouraged me to give him a brief synopsis of the piece in French, quite unnecessary, it appeared, since he took it all in by the

Page 335 pores, understanding no word of the broad Irish, of course, but nodding approval and wrinkling his face with smiles at every climax! He led the applause with great resounding claps in the hollows of his hands, and told me he considered Mrs. Lemoyne “admirable” “tellement sympathique,” with a “vraie figure de thיatre,” commenting on the cleverness of her nasal intonations in an excess of excitement.

I told Coquelin how “Monsieur le Sous Prיfet” had charmed me at the Thursday Evening Club. He said it was one of his own great favorites. He then told for us the deliciously droll story I had heard from him before about “The Butterfly and the Fountain.” “Jolie nouvelle, originelle, dramatique, n’est ce pas? Eh! bien, ce roman c’est de moi.” His solemn, self-satisfied, halting, hobbling Englishman was perfect.

He told me it was astonishing how his American audiences had come to know him and respond to him since his first visit in the autumn. Now he believed them to be “veritables bons amis.”

We saw Coquelin in “Le Juif Polonais,” at this time an interesting contrast to Henry Irving in “The Bells.” In April we attended a meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club, held at the American art galleries, where Coquelin read a paper on “Moliטre and Shakespeare” - a very carefully prepared, analytical study of the two playwrights, showing a complete knowledge of Shakespeare’s works and characters. He read it, sitting, with much effect - a few witty sallies to begin, but afterward settling into harness with a keen, well-digested argument. General Horace Porter followed in some drolleries spoken in French with the strongest American accent I ever heard. Then Mr. Coudert spoke also in French - a pretty, graceful, telling speech, lauding

Page 336 Shakespeare, rallying first, then praising Coquelin to his heart’s content. Every one crowded around the guest of the evening afterward. When it came to my turn I said: “Bonsoir, Monsieur le Sous Prיfet,” and the gleam of his eye showed instant recollection.

All this took place in a gallery hung around with gloomy old Spanish masters of the Duc de Durcal collection sent over to be sold in New York.

Sir Henry Irving was at all times persona grata in New York. But, as I said before, save as a means of entertaining guests, the smart set never seemed to welcome even the fixed stars of the dramatic firmament into their homes, as the people of equivalent position so gladly do in London and Paris. Fortunately, there has always been existent in New York a larger, broader-visioned “set,” devotees of literature, art, music, and the drama, who have more than made good the omission.

Page 337 CHAPTER XV

IT has been hinted by disaffected people that the originator of authors’ readings from their own works has much to answer for; and so timorously I admit having devised for the benefit of the American Copyright League, then in strong need of funds for the prosecution of their cause, the first entertainment of this nature formally given in New York. The appeal made to me by the secretary of the association, Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, resulted in a meeting of their body at our home to discuss the advisability of two afternoons of “Authors’ Readings,” at the Madison Square Theatre, promised by the Messrs. Mallory should the idea take practical shape.

So general the attendance at this meeting, our chairs were exhausted, and after every one of his confrטres was seated, Mr. Lathrop, unobserved by his hostess, went behind a screen and drew out a venerable ancestral chair from Virginia, invalided through age and condemned to retire from active service ere calamity occurred. It was too bad that the proceedings of this dignified assemblage should have been inaugurated by the immediate crash of their honorable secretary to the floor amid the wreck of a Virginian heirloom, but the hilarity ensuing, together with Mr. Lathrop’s amiable acceptance of our apologies, did not affect subsequent proceedings unfavorably.

The plan was developed. A committee of ladies sold

Page 338 the tickets that brought together two splendid audiences. Mr. George William Curtis, always a drawing card in New York, opened the first day with a few pleasant remarks. Professor Charles Carroll read a poem sent by Dr. Holmes; Mr. Howells and Mr. Julian Hawthorne followed with selections from their own writings. Professor Boyesen, Mr. H. C. Bunner, Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, and Mr. Charles Dudley Warner made up the remainder of the programme with appropriate contributions.

The next day, some call having been made for women authors to aid in swelling the rather melancholy group upon the stage, a number of us took heart of grace to occupy seats in the rear. When the curtain rose, and the Right Reverend the Bishop of New York stepped to the front, with all his accustomed grace, and began by a charming little tribute to the ladies, “our co-author and workers in this field who have honored us by appearing on the stage to-day,” a laugh ran through the audience, and the bishop, looking behind him, discovered not a single woman remaining in her place! Just before the curtain went up we had simultaneously arisen and stolen behind the scenes. Some people averred it was through stage-fright, but one honest woman declared we had thought of how dreadful the men had looked behind the foot-lights the previous day, and actually dared not face them.

Mr. John Boyle O’Reilly, Mr. Howells, Mr. Stockton, Mr. Clemens, Mr. Lathrop, and Dr. Eggleston were the contributors on this day; but the most dramatic effect of all was produced by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, whose story from his “Star Papers,” of a street waif stretching a hand through the railings around Grace Church, in Broadway, to pick the first dandelion

Page 339 of spring, was a masterpiece of delivery - his voice literally playing upon the heart-strings of his audience.

Mrs. L. W. Champney told an anecdote before the Woman’s Club of Sorosis of her being invited to be present at the Author’s Club to discuss the question of the new copyright bill, its coffers now enriched by some two thousand five hundred dollars as a result of these two readings. There was a pouring rain, and like a wise virgin she donned water-proof and goloshes, and sought the place appointed. A rather astonished servant admitted her, and when she reached the clubroom she was received with cordial greeting. Charles Dudley Warner removed her dripping water-proof, and Mr. Howells took charge of her more dripping umbrella, while a third chivalrous author of note went down on his knees to take off her goloshes. She was the only woman there! Much embarrassed and flustered, Mrs. Champney took her seat and tried to compose herself, but in vain. Presently, in came Mrs. Burton Harrison, serene and composed, who sat down beside her smilingly, and told how she had asked the aged negro at the door if there were any ladies present, and was answered “Yes ma’am. She’s upstairs!” “Out of the agitation of that rainy day’s discussion of the copyright laws,” added Mrs. Champney, “the new bill was formed and made a law.”

I remember this circumstance, and that I ever after associated the copyright bill with the smell of damp India-rubber drying in a hot room.

The kind reception of these two entertainments suggested to me something of the same order, to be given by invitation to our house, of as many guests as we could accommodate for an evening party. It was embodied in a single issue of “a journal of a night,” called

Page 340 The Ephemeron, not printed, but read aloud by the editorial staff and contributors. These last were selected from among my literary friends, and the table of contents follows:

Introductory … . . The Editor.

Telegraphic Reports … . . J. Brander Matthews.

Reporter’s Note Book … . . Frederick W. Whitridge.

Song, “After Sorrow’s Night” … . . R. W. Gilder.

A Literary Malaprop … . . The Editor.

Day Lilies … . . Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Two Sonnets … . . Emma Lazarus.

The Shy Man at a Musical Party … . . M. E. W. Sherwood.

A Porcelain Pug … . . Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The Dude … . . James B. Townsend.

Miss Pinky Rosebud on Coeducation … . . F. Benedict Herzog.

A Shingle Girl … . . William Henry Bishop.

Opals … . . George Parsons Lathrop.

May Day … . . Dora Goodale.

Two years later, in a more capacious house to which we had removed at 83 Irving Place - still looking into the green precincts of Gramercy Park, although on the other side - I repeated The Ephemeron when it became our turn to receive the Thursday Evening Club. On this occasion my associate editors were Bishop Potter and Judge Howland, while to Professor Charles Carroll, of the New York University, and the silver-tongued Mr. Daniel Dougherty fell the reading of articles by authors too shy to interpret their own productions.

What was lacking in the text of The Ephemeron was spoken by my witty and scholarly coadjutors. We had Bishop Potter’s “Dream of the Thursday Evening Club of the Future”; advance sheets of poems and sketches sent me by the editors of the Century, the Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, and the Critic; a chapter

Page 341 of a new novel by Mr. Frank R. Stockton, read by the author, sent with the compliments of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, of the Atlantic Monthly; two poems from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder; stories read by Mr. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen and Mr. Julian Hawthorne; a poem called “Geist’s Grave,” by Matthew Arnold, contributed by his daughter; a sketch by Mrs. F. R. Jones, and another called “The Moujik,” by Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, read by Mr. Dougherty; an amusing skit by Mr. John Kendrick Bangs; and poems by Miss Edith Thomas, George Parsons Lathrop, and Mrs. Piatt; all this, punctuated by a patter of polite applause from a hundred seated guests, and followed by a supper, made the second issue of my gauze-winged creature of an hour an occasion both merry and memorable.

The Thursday Evening Club, still in the green afternoon of healthy age, met at the houses of different members, to each of whom was allowed the privilege of selecting the programme of entertainment - these differing widely - followed by an hour of talk among the guests. To this club have belonged successive generations of the more conservative families of New York; its waiting list is long, and elected members step serenely into place conscious that neither fleeting time nor fickle fashion can disturb their dignified tenure of the privilege.

To enumerate the past and present officers of this association would be an interesting chapter, but the club is before everything an affair for private entertainment. Of its many meetings it were hard to single those most luminous in memory. From the lordly mansions wherein Paderewski played for us, Coquelin recited, or Nordica and Schumann-Heink sang adorably,

Page 342 we would adjourn to far simpler homes where the programme was the outgrowth of native talent and ingenuity; where some new discovery in science or exploration was given at first hand by the exponent; or else some question of civic interest, philanthropy, education, or anything bearing upon the elevation of our homes and the social brotherhood was so discussed that all who listened might understand and profit. At times the club relaxed into simple, unadulterated fun, as in the mock trial at Judge Howland’s, where Mr. Richard Hunt, as counsel for the prosecution, interrogated the brilliant wife of Dr. William Draper (daughter of Mr. Charles A. Dana, of the Sun), who represented Bridget, a scrubwoman, a witness for the defence. “And what, Bridget, was the nature of your occupation before you came to work in this office building?” “Please, your honor,” came the answer, like a flash, “I was takin’ care o’ Dr. Draper’s children.”

This trial brought out further a war of wits between Judge Howland, Mr. Hunt, and my husband, of which the details were too local and evanescent to repeat, that kept the audience in a roar of irresistible laughter.

I was interested in the foundation of the Nineteenth Century Club by my neighbor, Mr. Courtland Palmer, of Gramercy Park, who, in the nebulous days of this vigorous undertaking, asked me to serve as a vice-president and also upon the lecture committee of the club, which I did for many years. The meetings, first held by Mr. and Mrs. Palmer in their own spacious house, were to many besides myself a revelation of broad thought freely expressed by leading exponents on divers sides of questions, theological, scientific, economic, musical, artistic, or literary. The fervid soul of the president, Mr. Palmer - kept always in check by his

Page 343 courteous deference to the views of his co-workers - knew no bounds in his ambition for this club. Upon the lecture committee were also Mr. Parke Godwin and Mr. D. G. Thompson, I acting as a sort of conservative brake when the outline for an evening’s discussion, or a person proposed by Mr. Palmer whom I believed would prove unwelcome to the women of the club, caused a threatened undue acceleration of its wheels!

Many a time the lecture committee meeting consisted only of Mr. Palmer and myself, and I can truly say that I never met from him aught save the nicest consideration of good taste as well as the highest interests of the club. It was an experiment hitherto untried, to bring into drawing-room discussion some of the original thinkers he proposed, but the results were signally successful and stimulating. The two secretaries of the club during my connection with it were young men destined to a large share of the world’s observation in days to come: Mr. William Travers Jerome, later District-Attorney of New York City, and the present Attorney-General of the United States, Hon. George W. Wickersham, who succeeded Mr. Jerome. In a recent conversation with the Attorney-General, designed to refresh my memory of those early days of the club, I found him quite of my opinion regarding its interest and intellectual value to the community of New York. As an example of its scope, we had a dignified debate upon religion sustained between a monsignor of Rome, a Jew, a Free-Thinker, a Churchman, and an Unitarian. Upon this occasion the Latin prelate asked Rabbi Gottheil, who had taken part, why he had not stood by him in a certain position attacked by the others. “For,” he added, “we are the only ones here who believe anything.”

Page 344

The appearance before the club of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and George W. Cable, representing literature; of Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick W. Coudert, discussing politics; of John Swinton, embodying socialism; of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, the brilliant Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, and Miss Kate Field; of the Rev. Robert Collyer, the stalwart Yorkshireman and well-beloved divine; of the Rev. Dr. Heber Newton, Max O’Rell, Andrew Carnegie, Felix Adler, Mr. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (subsequently president of the club), and many another leader of thought and action in our land, upon subjects too varied and numerous to here detail, will give some further idea of the nature of the meetings. Of the founder I quote an apt description in his funeral oration by Robert G. Ingersoll.

“He was a believer in intellectual hospitality, in the fair exchange of thought, in good mental manners, in the amenities of the soul, in the chivalry of discussion.” The motto of the Nineteenth Century Club was: “Prove all things. Hold fast to that which is good.”

A private house where the addition of a well-equipped lecture-room made possible the presence of a large number of guests was that of the late Professor Henry M. Draper in Madison Avenue, whose widow has, with far-reaching liberality, carried on his life work in astronomical research.

Here we enjoyed many inspiriting evenings of lecture and experiment by inventors and high experts from abroad and from all parts of America. The first revelation, with illustration by experiment, of the unbelievable marvel of Marconi’s wireless telegraphy to a company of private persons was there made by the wizard young Italian, sending us all home dazzled, bewildered,

Page 345 and still slightly incredulous, to dream of wonders now a thing of every day.

I used to enjoy at second hand the fun of the University Dining Club (of which my husband was secretary at the time of his death), for a long time a sort of sacred circle of wits and good talkers. Their dinners, given from time to time, each under charge for the evening of a member, called “The Caterer,” were held at different clubs, although the University was the fountain-head of membership. These banquets were followed by evenings of merry talk, speeches, and what not, when the grave and dignified seniors who made up the list became boys again, disporting themselves in the sunshine of mutual friendship. In the space of a few short years death swept through its ranks with startling rapidity. The necrology numbered such choice spirits as Charles C. Beaman, Frank Kernochan, Alfred Taylor, Buchanan Winthrop, Frederic de Peyster, George Baldwin, and Burton Harrison; also the member who stood in loco parentis to the club, Mr. Edward Cooper - and, subsequently, Charles Barney. Of a joyous group taken upon the veranda of Mr. Beaman’s summer home in Vermont, where the club went upon a winter frolic in 1889, Mr. Frederic Stevens and Judge Howland are, I believe, the sole survivors.

By the time old Trinity bells had rung in a score of years after our settling in New York all was supremely changed. Externally, as in customs, standards, and observances, it was a new city. The race for power and wealth first began to make itself felt in the break-up of visible home life among the friends who of old met in cordial informal fashion. Hours moved on, and inexpensive parties became things of the past.

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The life of the bread-winner took on the gait that has now become the pace that kills. Clever, masterful men who set out to win huge fortunes in a decade, to juggle with stocks and railways, to develop the common necessaries of life in a great continent, to delve underground for the wealth of fairy tales, enriched themselves indeed beyond the dreams of avarice, but at what a cost! From morning till night they toiled in their offices, going home at night tired of everything, eagerly craving rest.

What they found in these homes is a tale familiar to New Yorkers. Households straining every nerve to keep up with society; dinners of ceremony abroad or at home; evenings at opera or play, dances following; the husband and father forced, night after night, into attendance at functions from which he would be thankful to Heaven could he but tear himself away to bury his weary head and quivering nerves under cover of his couch.

Some one has called Wall Street the nursery of paralysis. What is to be said of nights of exhausting entertainments after days in Wall Street? No wonder those who wander much abroad are continually running upon the spectacle of some once famous master of finance of our own land, shrivelled and shrunken, in the hands of nurses to whom he is but as a child, spending dull days in wandering from cure to cure in a manner pitiful to look upon. This is the price they are paying for making the world wonder at their money-getting. Their great houses in their native land remain forsaken and shut up, while Europe gives their owners unenthusiastic shelter till they are ready to go home and die!

To this period we may date back the first struggles for social prominence among people hitherto unknown in

Page 347 the ranks of society; the craze for travel in every practicable part of the world; the overtraining and overindulgence of children; the general unrest. Some of those who succeeded in shooting like meteors across the social firmament have disappeared entirely. To many of the more stable ones have come the disintegration of the family circle by divorce and their reconstruction under unnatural conditions, so that the uninformed outsider is confused to know how to place, genealogically, many of the leaders of to-day in the families whose names they bear.

Rebuilding, repaving New York has brought about a more attractive external aspect. Transit is immeasurably better but still behind that of most European capitals. Entertainments held in the great new palaces of the rich are now the last word in splendor and completeness. All over the Eastern shore are scattered country houses, shooting lodges, bungalows, inhabited islands and reservations, luxurious camps, for the resort of those who are not otherwise spending months abroad, sailing their yachts to all the picturesque ports of Europe, or circling the globe with parties of invited friends - doing anything, it would seem, to get away from the uninteresting extravagance of life in their native land.

When the million-makers first began indulging in these vagaries, a larger class of professional and business men of more enlightened type stayed at home with their families and went about their daily avocations with increased comforts in the methods of so doing, increased returns from their work, and vastly increased expenses. I think that at the dinners of that period we had pleasanter reunions of brighter minds and more vivid personalities than in years subsequent when New

Page 348 York had reached her present eminence of material prosperity. In my husband’s area of professional acquaintanceship were men whose presence at a dinner was sure to make the wheels of thought and talk revolve brilliantly. With either Mr. Choate, Mr. James C. Carter, Mr. Beaman, Judge Howland, or Judge Patterson in the circle around a friendly board, there was always something to key other guests to a high pitch of enjoyable expectation and realization. But no one could long kick against the pricks of plutocracy.

Magnificence in entertainments had come to stay. New families, new houses, flunkies in plush breeches, gold services at dinner, the importation of priceless pictures, tapestries, wall panellings, doors, ceilings, and furniture from Old-World places, the building of sumptuous dwellings, rose to the front and remained there. For a few years following this birth of splendor in the metropolis private entertainments were a wonder to lookers-on. Each hostess strove to outdo the other in sensational display. The giving of costly gifts to invited guests was begun and overdone. People of the old order, of moderate means and hospitable impulses, found their invitations superseded by those of the beneficent plutocrats of the new. Their children frankly avowed preference for latter-day splendor over the dull comfort of the bygones! Thus the iron entered into the souls of those who aspired to feel that their offspring would rise superior to mere show and glitter in homes of yesterday, and for this reason, chiefly, many of the pleasantest houses of the old rיgime closed their doors and gave up the ghost as leading entertainers.

What joy it used to be to escape from the ever-increasing stress and turmoil of our winter home to the

Page 349 sea-girt island of Mount Desert, where we finally built a summer residence at Bar Harbor on the shores of Frenchman’s Bay, after many conferences with our architect, that fine artistic spirit, Mr. Arthur Rotch, of Boston! I called our picturesque cottage (which went on from year to year expanding with our needs) Sea Urchins, partly to justify the avowed intention of teaching our lads to know and live the water life of the island and also because in the spot where Mr. Rotch drove the stake for the corner-stone of our dwelling we dislodged a large cache of sea urchins’ shells, left there by birds who had flown with them from the shore forty feet away.

We had first visited the tiny fishing hamlet of Bar Harbor in 1871, sojourning in the cottage of Captain Royal George Higgins, a brave mariner whose corner cupboard contained a set of silver presented to him by the passengers of a wrecked bark saved by his gallantry. Here we had the company of several pleasant “rusticators,” as the summer visitor has always been called in the Maine vernacular, chiefly authors, artists, and university men, including my husband’s former instructors, those Olympians of Yale College, Dr. Porter and Dr. Woolsey, disporting themselves like schoolboys in a sparkling atmosphere. I remember a sail to one of the islands, carrying our luncheon compounded by ourselves, when the Rev. “Prexy” Porter stretched himself at full length on a bed of white-capped moss, and recited poetry in lotos-eating ease. When, some years later, we bought our land at the cost of city lots, and began building our house, we spent a summer in a cottage in Albert Meadow, scantily furnished indeed, but to us and our boys as full of iridescent charm as any fairy palace in a soap bubble.

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Our first visitors as residents of the island were Sir Clements Markham, long president of the Royal Geographical Society of London, a connection through the English Fairfaxes, who, with his wife, came over for a summer journey to America. The guests arrived in the teeth of one of the fierce easterly gales that sometimes sweep our island, and were, I think, relieved not to find us in a fisherman’s hut, sitting around a fire of driftwood mending nets, as I had suggested in my letter sent to meet them in Boston. That night the little house shook in the fury of the storm, but next day dawned crystal clear and crisp, the mountain ledges glittered in the sun, and the whole world smelt of pine, birch, sweet balsam fir, and Atlantic brine. Our manly and delightful visitor lost no time in inviting our lads to accompany him on the ascent of Newport Mountain, where he made a map of the island and came down knowing more than any of us about everything, except the fact that Champlain had discovered it; that Talleyrand had come there in a fishing smack (and was by many supposed to be a native of the island); and that Argall, the pirate, had massacred a band of French Jesuit priests at Somes Sound in 1609.

We drove in a buckboard to Beach Hill, carrying our tea basket to the summit of the cliff looking down into a sparkling fiord, where some brewed tea while others threw their rugs over lowlying mattresses of fragrant bush juniper and rested like kings at ease. During the week of the Markhams’ visit we had consistently glorious weather for our expeditions far and near. Many a time in later days in London has genial Sir Clements recalled with me those days of gypsying on the far Maine coast.

When ready to move into Sea Urchins from the

Page 351 village, my carriage failing to come in time, I was convoyed thither by Mr. James G. Blaine, who, with Mrs. Blaine, was en route to take possession of their own just finished villa, Stanwood, beautifully situated on the hill-side just over Sea Urchins. (“If I were so inclined,” said Mr. Blaine, “I could sit on my veranda and throw potatoes down your kitchen chimney!”) I have always remembered my installation at my Bar Harbor home, Mr. Blaine stepping to the ground and assisting me to my door-stone, then, with the charming grace of which he was master, making over me a little airy invocation to the fates that I might be as happy there as I, “who made so many others happy,” deserved to be. The compliment, however unmerited, was so daintily achieved, while Mrs. Blaine, one of my boys, and the buckboard driver made a smiling audience, that I venture to insert it here.

Mr. Blaine was often our guest thereafter and we theirs. He was always a brilliant and sympathetic companion, and seemed at his best and happiest at Stanwood, surrounded by his clever family in the air of his native pines.

To begin writing about Bar Harbor and the joys it has brought into our life, of the interesting and memorable entertainments we gave and received there, and the delightful people who yearly drifted to the island, is to want not to lay by one’s pen.

Mr. Matthew Arnold, who had promised to come to us just before his departure from America in 1886, wrote me a note of regret in these terms: “STOCKBRIDGE, MASS., Aug. 20th, 1886.

“I have deferred writing because I was really anxious to propose coming to you next week, but last night I

Page 352 had again one of those attacks of pain across the chest which your too-stimulating climate has given to me; and as I read in the papers that at Bar Harbor a man liable to seasickness is thought intolerable, what would be thought there of a man liable to spasms of the chest? I have therefore made up my mind to remain quietly here, and to deny myself the very great pleasure of a visit to you. We sail for England on the 4th of September, and I shall need all my solidity for the passage. But I assure you that to fail in my engagement to you is a grievous disappointment to me. I only console myself by the hope of seeing you before very long on the other side of the Atlantic. “Believe me, dear Mrs. Burton Harrison, most respectfully and sincerely yours, “MATTHEW ARNOLD.”

I had arranged for Mr. Arnold’s pleasure, on one of the afternoons he was to have spent with us, a water pageant of Indian birch-bark canoes, one of the prettiest and most characteristic spectacles imaginable, as seen from the rock bastion of our lawn over the sea. The canoe club duly made its appearance from behind Bar Island, went through its manoeuvres, and came in to have tea upon the lawn. There was some confusion in the announcement that our guest of honor was after all not present, and most canoeists went home firmly believing they had been seen and admired by the famous apostle of sweetness and light, our local newspapers duly announcing the great man’s presence.

The Bar Harbor home is still in my possession, though less frequently resorted to in days when those whose companionship made its charm complete are lacking. It is a common thing to hear people nowadays

Page 353 assert conviction that Bar Harbor, in becoming one of the most renowned haunts of fashion in America, is irremediably spoiled. But certain it is that nothing short of an earthquake or a tidal wave demolishing it can impair its supreme and enduring hold over old-time devotees.

I come now to the time when my zeal for works of charity and dramatic diversion was to be turned definitely into the channel of professional literary labor.

Sitting in our pew at Calvary Church during a weekday Lenten service, my thoughts went over the social conditions then governing New York, and I “planned out” a story, subsequently written in a few weeks at my home, its plot and characters epitomizing the new extravagance of society, which I called “The Anglomaniacs.” On my way from service I fell in with our good friends Mr. Joseph Gilder and his sister, Miss Jeannette Gilder, editors of the Critic, to whom I confided the inception of my scheme, pledging them to a secrecy for many months faithfully observed. Excepting my own household and, later, Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, of the Century Magazine, to whom his sister succeeded in carrying my manuscript without revealing the author’s name, no one knew of my connection with the novel until it had run as a serial through the magazine.

I quote from my journal kept at the time: “By appointment, to the Century office to talk with R. W. G. about the A. M’s. It was all charmingly funny and mysterious, that closeting in his sanctum with the editor-in- chief; those at the desks outside supposing, no doubt, I had come to submit a new Dictionary. The orders were that no one should disturb us. Only Mr. Drake dropped in, momently, about some important

Page 354 art matter, and Mr. William Carey to read aloud a letter from Henry M. Stanley. I was delighted to hear that Mr. G. thinks uncommonly well of my story; he says he read it first without knowing me in the pages, then recognized certain qualities and determined at once to begin publishing it in the May Century if possible.

“Literature is the order of the day at 83 Irving Place. F., in the intervals of service at the oar in the Yale crew, is writing his essay for the De Forrest prize. F. B. H. has on hand a prize composition on the ‘Sea Venture,’ and A. came in with a droll face, saying his subject for composition this week at Cutler’s, was the ‘Mississippi Bubble,’ and as he had to find his own facts, asking if he should look in the Encyclopedia under the heading of ‘Mississippi’ or of ‘Bubble.’ This recalled to B., the Sophomore at Yale who had for subject “Is the Baptism of Suffering Necessary to the development of a Great Soul?” and went to the library enquiring for all the treatises on Infant Baptism.”

Another entry is as follows:

“Read the finish of my book, which they had not heard, to my Council of Four after dinner in the library, all of them luxuriously propped with silken pillows to enable them to stand the strain! Poor undefended family! ‘Rah! Rah! Rah! Mother!’ was the verdict in a Yale roar that deafened me! Then, they were sworn to secrecy.

“Feb. 26. A hurried and conspirator-like note from R. W. G., saying he can work the first of the A. M’s into the June number, and would I send him my final corrected version. As my upstairs servants are known at the office, I haled up the little new Irish laundress Alice, whom we have dubbed ‘The Bog Fairy’ and asked her if she knew the way to Union

Page 355 Square. ‘Oh! yes ma’m, to that Cemetery place where you do be sending parcels now and thin!’ I despatched her with the papers, unblushingly telling her if anyone asked who sent them to say she didn’t know. She is bright enough looking to be taken for a bran new genius with MSS. in hand.”

The next entry:

“Have just seen the drawings in illustration of the A. M’s. They are done by Charles Dana Gibson, a new young artist for whom the Century people and others predict a brilliant future. I am simply delighted with them. I hear Mr. Gibson says drawing these society types has opened a new vein to him which he enjoys greatly.

And lastly:

“Read the first instalment of the A. M’s in the June Century, - when F. had finished it, - in the drawing room car returning from New Haven to New York. We had no end of fun hearing a man and a girl in the chairs opposite ours discussing it with fervor.”

During that summer my somewhat embarrassing diversion was to hear the story talked over at the luncheons and dinners at Bar Harbor, and to be frequently called upon for an opinion pro or con. I read constantly in the newspapers of some new author or old one to whom it was attributed, generally a man. Letters poured in on me through the editors of the Century.

By the end of its run in the magazine, so many claimants had arisen to own themselves responsible for the story, that I was hardly surprised, at a large dinner in Bar Harbor, to hear a secretary of the German legation in Washington, who had just arrived from Newport, announce to the company that he was in a position to state that the author had at last been discovered

Page 356 in the person of a lady then in Newport “whom everybody knew.”

“I am positive, because she told me so herself yesterday,” he added, turning to me, who sat beside him.

“Indeed?” I said calmly. “How very interesting!”

In the end, I wrote to Mr. Joseph Gilder saying he might, if he so desired, tell the fact of the authorship in the Critic. He, in turn, gave it to Mr. Richard Harding Davis, the future novelist, then a young reporter on the New York Evening Sun, which duly proclaimed my secret, the Critic endorsing it next morning.

And so my innocent mystification had run its brief course, affording much sport but a few anxious moments to the author, who felt all the summer like a monster of duplicity.

When I was sailing across the Atlantic the following spring, I had for fellow-passenger, on the Majestic, Mr. John Hay, reputed author of the anonymous novel, “The Bread-Winners,” whose secret was, however, never officially disclosed. We had had a wonderfully tranquil voyage; as Mr. Hay said, “the sea as smooth and monotonous as a poem by Lewis Morris”; but one evening, when he had been sitting by my chair on deck talking with the genial charm and variety that always characterized him, the old Majestic suddenly began a series of rather sharp rolls. Mr. Hay undertaking to convoy me below in safety, we were caught on the companionway by three or four slanting movements of the ship, making it impossible for us to do aught save stand helpless, hand in hand, clutching with our free hands at the rails and swaying absurdly to and fro. “What a situation for the authors of the ‘Bread-Winners’ and the ‘Anglomaniacs’!” I said to him tentatively. But the trained diplomat failed to betray

Page 357 himself, responding only by a merry twinkle of the eye.

During my husband’s absence on business in London in the spring of 1892, I went with my brother, as one of a large party of invited guests, by special train to the newly built Four Seasons Hotel, at Cumberland Gap, in Tennessee, where the directors of a new land company and health resort scheme had arranged for us a week of sports and entertainments in glorious mountain air and scenery. About forty congenial persons from New York and Washington made up the party, the mountaineers and their families along the route assembling at stations to see the notabilities among them. The chief attraction, strange to say, seemed to be Mr. Ward McAllister, who was expected, but did not go. At one station Mr. James Brown Potter, engaged in taking a “constitutional” walk along a cinder path while we stopped, was mischievously pointed out by Dr. Holbrook Curtis, to a group of gaping natives as the famous arbiter of New York fashion.

“I want ter know!” remarked a butternut-garbed horseman in cowhide boots. “Wal, I’ve rid fifteen miles a-purpus to see that dude McAllister, an’ I don’t begrutch it, not a mite.”

On our way home we stopped in Washington to dine with Sir Julian and Lady Pauncefote, who with her daughter was of our party, at the British legation. Next day, a luncheon was given for me by M. Pierre Botkine, of the Russian legation, whose article in defence of the Russian Government I had helped him to put into English, then introduced it to the editor of the Century Magazine. M. de Strove, the Russian minister, Mr. Gregor, M. Beckfries, of the Swedish legation; Marquis Imperiali, of the Italian legation; Miss Pauncefote;

Page 358 my two girl friends, Miss Lawrence and Miss Perkins, and I, gathered around a table covered with Russian embroideries and American roses, for a charming little feast. We were asked to the White House by the President’s daughter, a pretty, gracious little lady with a face like a deep-tinted cameo, who called to invite me to hear a singing somebody, who was to perform for the President alone.

Clever Mrs. Barney gave me a large reception, with troops of people, in her artistic house; and there were theatre-parties, luncheons, dinners for every day. Colonel John Hay, whose wife was out of town, asked us for a cup of tea in his beautiful home on Lafayette Square, then all abloom with spring.

Mrs. Don Cameron, a lovely creature, poured tea in Mrs. Hay’s absence. Mrs. Cameron’s daughters, Miss Blaine, Miss Mary Leiter (afterward Lady Curzon), Mrs. Cabot Lodge, and a few other women were there. The men included Mr. Hay’s beloved intimates, Mr. Clarence King and Mr. Henry Adams; also Judge Davis, Mr. Michael Herbert, of the British legation, and Mr. Alan Johnston, “said to be engaged to our pretty neighbor in Gramercy Park, Nettie Pinchot.” Then Colonel Hay took me off into a corner to show me an original MS. of “Maryland, my Maryland!” written for him by the author, Randall, and a little thrill ran through my veins at the memory of that June night at camp at Manassas, when we set it afloat on the Army of Northern Virginia, with gray soldiers in ambush behind the trees catching up the triumphing refrain!

To touch upon my early visits to London. I can’t remember just when I first made acquaintance with Thackeray’s daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, now

Page 359 Lady Ritchie, whose father had been my literary idol and whose charming cordiality of welcome mingles with the pleasantest of my souvenirs. My youngest son and I went several times to visit her at Wimbledon, once to celebrate Thackeray’s birthday, when she showed us the original sketches of “The Rose and the Ring,” with explanatory talk of the way in which that immortal fairy tale had taken shape in Rome. When she hesitated for a name of one of the characters, and my boy from the little group of spectators facing her table supplied it, she cried out in joyous cadence, “Well done, America!” I have a very precious little batch of Lady Ritchie’s notes and letters.

Mrs. Walford, whose delightful novels are an integral part of the home literature of England, became a friend for whom my affectionate regard has continued along the path of life. We visited her at Cranbrooke Hall, and she came to us in New York with her daughter Olive. Her sweet, sunny temper and elastic gayety of disposition are reflected in her writings as they illuminate her home. We saw Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) and her sister, Rose Kingsley, who, with her noble father, Canon Charles Kingsley, had visited us in New York.

My husband had crossed the ocean, as a cabinmate of Canon Kingsley’s, a stimulating mental experience. Mr. Kingsley afterward said of his companion that he possessed the wholesome vigor of a Western prairie wind.

I saw Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) often, both in London and New York. She had a wonderful personal charm and acceptability to her friends, as well as the genius that made her a marked woman in her era. Mrs. Chandler Moulton was a great favorite in London in my time. Mrs. Humphry Ward I met more seldom, and Mrs. Atherton I knew both in Bar Harbor and

Page 360 London. Among the men of mark whom it has been my pleasure and privilege to meet in my London visits I may cite Lord Morley, Lord Curzon, Mr. Balfour, Lord Alverstone, Lord Glenesk, Lord Playfair, Mr. Matthew Arnold, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Sir Gilbert Parker, Mr. Edmund Gosse, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Professor Waldstein, Mr. Henry James, M. Paul Blouכt (Max O’Rell), Sir Edwin Arnold, Mr. “Anthony Hope,” Sir Clements Markham, Mr. J. W. Cross (husband of George Eliot), and many another. To mention the incidents and places of these meetings, and to enlarge upon the personalities of those I encountered, would require another volume.

In London I was once one of the sixteen guests of honor at a large dinner of the “New Vagabonds” Club, over which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presided. I had never known such an experience, and a seat at the High Table with the other lions of the menagerie frightened me dreadfully. How much more so when, at the end of a very graceful little speech by Conan Doyle, during which I was wondering who the subject of these charming words could be, I heard mention of “The Anglomaniacs,” then my own name. A sepulchral voice behind me whispered, “You are expected to say a few words in answer.” “But I can’t,” I whispered back in agony. “Then rise and bow to right, left, and centre,” came the voice, with a note of disapprobation at my stupidity.

This I did, mutely, tremblingly, before an audience of hundreds of well-dressed and critical aliens, seated at tables in the body of the hall, finally sinking into my seat, heartily wishing I had been trained, like the English women-authors present, to speak a few apt words in public when need called for them. I wrote home

Page 361 that my only consolation in the trying moment had been the fact that I wore a new black satin gown, just come home from Madame Amy, with spangles on every seam!

I was consoled after this episode, to receive from Mrs. Burnett a note asking me to be present at a dinner at the Authors’ Club given in her honor, wherein occurs this phrase: “It is very complimentary of these distinguished gentlemen, but I would as soon be boiled alive as make the few remarks decency will demand I should upon the occasion. But as I lived through the speech to the New Vagabonds, I may survive this.” I find a number of sprightly notes from this charming correspondent, one of them telling me of her retreat to the banks of the Thames, to finish the play “A Lady of Quality,” and urging me, too, to retire to the country before London should “kill me with much cherishing,” a fate I had certainly not her reason to anticipate, although the pace was swift, the people I met constantly differing, and the engagements delightfully varied. Not a day passed without its half-dozen parties and invitations to meet those known to the world of art, literature, statesmanship, and fashion, so blended as to furnish refreshing variety. This has always been my experience in London, making it, in my eyes, the one social centre best worth while in the world. Neither Paris, Rome, New York, nor Washington can vie with it in these respects. But as this modest chronicle is chiefly designed to outline the busy and joyous years of my life in the South and, later, in the city of my adoption, I must condense my theme.

Alternating with our summers spent at Sea Urchins, we and our sons made many journeys abroad, visiting together, or in couples, most of the practicable parts of

Page 362 Europe. In London, and in visits to country houses and ancient historic homes in England, Ireland, and Scotland, I felt, of course, more closely allied to people and things than on the Continent; but to the present day, including a motor run last summer through Holland and Belgium and in the Black Forest, my delight has been to explore Old-World haunts with congenial companions.

Perhaps the most varied and altogether satisfying of all my journeys was a “Loop around Europe” in the summer when, with my husband and my son Francis, I left England after spending Henley week upon the Thames, the junior member of the party crossing from Hull to Norway to do some mountaineering among the fiords, whilst we proceeded to Calais, and went from Brussels via Copenhagen to Christiania, where he rejoined us. Our way was as little hackneyed as we could make it, our dיtours in the north countries being marked by intentional wanderings from the beaten paths. From Finland we entered Russia, and in Petersburg fell in, to my surprise, with my brother on his way home via the Siberian railway from China, one of several similar journeys undertaken by him in the interests of an American-Chinese syndicate; his object in the Russian capital, a semi-diplomatic mission, to meet certain high Russian officials in order to adjust their combined interests in northern China. Our minister at St. Petersburg, Mr. Clifford Breckinridge, an old shipmate of Mr. Cary’s in the Confederate States navy, readily procured for him the necessary audiences with Prince Lobanoff, then prime-minister and one of the foremost statesmen in Europe.

A month later, when we arrived at Kieff, the Jerusalem of southern Russia, for a week’s visit, during that

Page 363 of their imperial majesties, the newly crowned czar and czarina, we met in the station the funeral cortטge of Prince Lobanoff, who had died on the train while coming in to Kieff with the imperial party.

Here we met the famous Probיdenotsעf, the head of the Russian Synod, to whom was attributed so many of the severities of the early part of the present emperor’s reign. A cold, cruel face, I thought, my ideal of a Spanish inquisitor. Our friend, Prince Andronykoff, who brought us together, was amused by my instinctive antipathy for the czar’s great counsellor.

We had previously travelled with a different kind of churchman, to whom we were especially commended - Father John of Kronstadt, the gentle and saintly “miracle-worker” of the priesthood - who asked me when I left Russia to speak always of the good things I had met there, not of the evil, like so many travellers and writers. He, certainly, was prominent among the subjects permitted me!

At St. Petersburg I had received the compliment of a “passe-partout,” given to authors visiting Russia during the coronation summer, entitling me to passage by train and boat throughout the czar’s dominions. Our little party was happily augmented by a young lady of English birth, who spoke the Russian language like a native, whom I was fortunate enough to secure as comrade and interpreter. We travelled - everywhere finding telegrams sent ahead by authority in St. Petersburg to secure our comfort - to Moscow, Nijni-Novgorod, and the whole length of the Volga River, visiting Kazan, the ancient Tartar city, and other towns along its banks, crossing southern Russia, as I have said, to Kieff and Odessa, finally traversing the Black Sea on an up-to-date Clyde-built steamer, with porcelain bath-tubs and brass

Page 364 bedsteads and a pleasant company in the saloon, the meals served with all the dainties of the region. Running through the ֶgean Sea in glorious weather, we reached Constantinople two days after the Armenian massacre of that year, when the blood of the victims, hastily covered with buckets of whitewash, was still sticky in the streets. Two exciting days were spent exploring the city in a landau, protected by my son, a dragoman, the coachman, and a “cavass,” a superbly uniformed native soldier lent me by our minister, Mr. Terrell, from the American legation. It was thrilling to be told that every Turk we met wearing a new handkerchief tied around his tarboosh had killed his Armenian; and on all sides hearing stories of recent violence and atrocity in the streets through which we passed. I had then my first view, in the museum, of the so-called sarcophagus of the great Alexander, which has always seemed to me the most beautiful marble I have seen.

From Constantinople to Smyrna, Patras, and Athens, thence in a filthy Italian ship, by way of the canal of Corinth (in which we crashed against the side of the chasm and nearly came to grief), to Corfu, Brindisi, and Naples, where we took the tiny steamer Ems for New York. The worst storm I ever encountered at sea was met off the Azores on that voyage home, but we arrived safely, none the worse for it.

Another year I went from New York with my son and his young wife in their private car on a journey of over nine thousand miles in our own country, visiting Mexico, Texas, and California before recrossing the continent.

In 1903 my husband and I made, with a merry young party, the circuit of the Mediterranean, visiting Funchal,

Page 365 Gibraltar, Algiers, Malta, Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Palestine, and Egypt, spending the spring months in Rome, thence returning by Venice and Milan to London. In London all our arrangements were concluded, through the kindness of friends, for an exceptionally good view of the intended pageant of King Edward’s coronation, when the news of the king’s illness came like a thunder-clap upon the preparations and altered everybody’s plans.

That spring in Italy had but made me lament the more the lost chord in my experience occasioned by my husband’s necessary refusal to accept the post of the first ambassador to Italy offered him by President Cleveland. The image of what might have been a complete holiday for us two busy brain-workers in hard-and-fast New York has many a time since arisen temptingly in mind.

The three winters after my husband’s death in 1904 were spent at beautiful, kindly Cannes, in the French Riviera, where nature overflows in blossom and residents lavish welcome upon the stranger within their gates. The last season was passed amid the palm and rose gardens and forests of pine and heather belonging to Chגteau St. Michel, which my son had leased for his little children and myself, from its owner, Lord Glenesk, who came there to visit us in the spring, and told many interesting stories of the celebrated and historic personages who had been his guests at the chגteau in the lifetime of his wife and son. The children used to love using the donkey-chair provided for the use of Empress Eugיnie, which we found in the stables and to which they annexed a pretty little cream-colored beast, the very genius of obstinacy, for the circuit of the spacious grounds. I remember one evening when Lord Glenesk told of his being asked to go and inform the empress of

Page 366 her son’s, the Prince Imperial’s, death in Africa, and a space of silence that ensued, while tears choked the old man’s utterance and poured down his cheeks like rain. Later that spring, after a dinner in his house in Piccadilly - Byron’s house, of which Lord Glenesk had made a museum of pictures, miniatures, objets d’art, and literary souvenirs - he showed me several relics of his intimacy with the family of Napoleon III as well as with other distinguished people. He described a dinner once taking place there, when, quite accidentally, there came together the three most noteworthy young royalties in Europe - Alfonso, King of Spain; Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria; and the Prince Imperial of France - all bright, gay, and boyish in their talk, all destined to tragic ending of lives full of promise. Amid his faded gildings and poignant souvenirs Lord Glenesk moved, a sad and solitary figure much troubled by physical infirmity, and never ceasing to mourn the loss of his only son (Hon. Algernon Borthinck, a charming young man who had brought us a letter of introduction to New York and dined with us some years previous).

A most engaging personality was that of Hon. Frederick Leveson-Gore - “Freddy,” as he was lovingly called by his intimates, an old man then, but possessed of an unfailing spring of sweetness, sympathy, and high intelligence that endeared him to all acquaintances. I saw him quite often in Cannes before the fatal cold he took that ended in pneumonia, and he had brought to me one of his books to read, which I returned with a note of thanks and appreciation, reaching him in his sick-room just at the last.

Lord Rendel, Gladstone’s friend, the owner of lovely Chגteau Thorenc, was full of recollections of his great hero’s visits, his habits when there on holidays, and the

Page 367 delightful abundance of his talk among intimate friends. He showed me the chair in which Gladstone used to sit and look out upon the orange groves and paradise of flowers surrounding the chגteau, of which words of description can give very faint idea.

A great pleasure was in our drives out to Chגteau Garibondy, to visit Lady Alfred Paget, oftenest found at work amid her gardens on the wild, picturesque hill-side looking up into deep gorges filled with forests of odorous pine. Here, on one occasion, my son and I drove out to meet at luncheon their royal highnesses, Comte and Comtesse de Caserta and two of the princesses of Bourbon-Sicily, the chief personages of resident society in Cannes, to whom I had been indebted for kindness and sympathy in a time of great stress and sorrow the previous year. Everybody loved and welcomed the gentle and gracious Countess of Caserta, whose husband would have been reigning sovereign of Naples had not that throne been dashed into nothingness by Garibaldi’s fiery action. I recall this occasion particularly because of the informality and gayety of the talk at table in the home-like dining-room of the quaint little old chגteau.

To H. R. H. Countess Caserta I was beholden for the pleasure of an acquaintance, one of the most interesting of all those whom I made in Cannes, with that royal Lady of Sorrows, Countess de Trani, sister of the illfated empress of Austria, and mother of the invalid princess of Hohenzollern, upon whom she was in loving attendance at the Hotel Californie in close vicinity to Chגteau St. Michel. I suppose no one could have had a more dramatic history than hers, one fuller of heartbreaking bereavements - and yet she was a lesson of noble resignation to the will of God,

Page 368 of heroic cheerfulness to all who came within the radius of her presence. A familiar sight in our bowery roads on the Californie hill was her tall, swiftly moving figure, so strongly resembling that of the empress of Austria, walking beside the invalid chair of Princess Hohenzollern, whose wit and spirit and vigorous young womanhood were doomed to an early ending in the following year. The death of this lady was to close for Countess Trani a cruel category of sorrows. The sudden violent death of her husband, Count Louis de Trani, the tragic breaking of the engagement of her young sister with Ludwig, the mad king of Bavaria; the frightful fate of the same sister, who, as Duchesse d’Alenחon, was burned up in the fire at the Charity Bazar in Paris; the execution of her close kinsman, Maximilian, emperor of Mexico; the madness of his wife Carlotta; the calamitous death of her nephew, Prince Rudolph of Austria, and, darkest tragedy of all, the assassination of her beloved and radiant sister, the Austrian empress, made up her litany of woes, soon to come to a climax in the loss of her only child.

As an escape from the dusty roads of the neighborhood, we offered to Princess Hohenzollern the use of the grounds of St. Michel, where, in walks of bamboo or lemon trees meeting overhead, she might be quite secluded from invasion. But she often stopped beside the children playing in their sand-heap among the pines for a friendly chat, or came among us upon the terrace blazing with flowers, making, when she felt in the mood for it, droll comments and quaint sayings about passing matters.

Countess de Trani lunched and took tea with me at St. Michel several times, and we had drives together, once to the garden at Cap d’Antibes, where, at the

Page 369 suggestion of the lady in waiting, Frהulein Nelly von Schmidt, we took tea in a humble little roadside inn instead of the stately hotel. We sat in a dingy inner room, and watched the peasants coming and going to drink their wine at the tables under the vine-clad pergola, which, said the kindly Frהulein, “Her Royal Highness always enjoys.” Another time we visited Mougins, the old fifteenth-century walled city on the hill rising from the olive groves, where she went in to the little shop to buy post-cards with the zeal of an ordinary tourist; and again, “on the road to Mandelieu,” where, when we got out of the carriage to see a new-born lamb and were wooed onward to pick white narcissus growing in masses in the rich meadow at hand, she walked with as light a step as a schoolgirl, soon acquiring a larger bouquet than any of us.

I dwell upon the memories of this lady because she has always seemed to me to realize the noblest type of womanhood - brave, serene, submissive, cheerful, yet never gay, wearing her inheritance of sorrow like a crown.

Another royal invalid to whom we extended a continuance of the freedom of crossing Lord Glenesk’s grounds was the elder Grand-Duke Michael of Russia, since passed away, son of Czar Nicholas I, and patriarch of the house of Romanoff, living at the Villa Valetta adjoining ours. He came once with his suite surrounding his donkey-chair, which he could not leave, and sent in to ask if I would receive his thanks in person, which I did, standing on the front driveway for a little talk, on his part gentle and courteous, although principally about the respective temperatures of our houses, the force of the mistral at certain points, etc. His daughter, the Grand-Duchess Anastasie, lived in an imposing villa

Page 370 not far off, and there the present crown princess of Germany passed her happy and beloved girlhood amid the “blue and gold” of Cannes.

The Grand-Duke Michael of Russia, with his popular wife, Countess Torby, and three charming, well-bred children, who came sometimes to play with ours, lived also near by; and in all these houses there was a perpetual va-et-vient of the Russian imperial family, making a page of contemporaneous history rather interesting to observe and hear about in the gossip of the drawing-rooms.

From Cannes that year I journeyed, with my friend Mrs. Stuart Forbes, the owner of Villa Valetta, which she had leased to the old Grand-Duke Michael, to Varese, through north Italy, and around the Italian lakes; bringing up finally in London in June, and afterward making visits in the north of England and in Scotland.

The following winter I took up my abode in Washington. In our busy world events go on accumulating till there seems no way to call a halt in a chronicle like this save by laying down the pen, and that I proceed to do.

Page 371

INDEX

A

Abbeville, Burton Harrison sent to, 225; Mrs. Davis at, 225; storm at, 226.

Academy of Design, the, loan collection at, 314.

Academy of Music, ball at, 284-5; rehearsal of Italian opera at, 292; “The

Mistletoe Bough” given at, 306.

Ackroyd, Colonel, 270.

Adami, Mademoiselle, French governess at Vaucluse, 24.

Adams, Henry, 358.

Addison, Mr. John, 60.

Adler, Felix, 344.

“Alceste,” the opera, 254.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 341.

Aldridge, Ira, a negro actor, 251.

Alexandria, town of, 26, 27, 28, 30-33, 107; prisoners of war at, 110.

Alfonso, king of Spain, 366.

Algiers, 365.

Allen, Mr. John, 147.

Altenburg, H. C., letter of, 64-65.

Alverstone, Lord, 360.

Ambler, Mary, 20.

American Copyright League, the, entertainment given for the benefit of, 337-8.

Anderson, Mary, 319.

– General Joseph, 158.

Andrews, Mrs. Walter Scott, 329, 332.

Andronykoff, Prince, 363.

“Anglomaniacs, The,” a novel by Mrs. Harrison, published in the Century

Magazine, 353,355-6; illustrated by Charles Dana Gibson, 355.

Annfield, 44.

“Annie Laurie,” 219.

Antietam, battle of, 93-94.

“Antiquities of Yorkshire,” Thoresby’s, purchased from B. F. Stevens, Esq., by

Fairfax Harrison, 35-36.

“Appomattox,” a picture painted by John A. Elder, 181.

Appomattox, surrender at, 220.

Arago, the, 244.

Archaimbaud, M., 245, 254, 256.

Arden, Edwin, 330.

Arlington, home of Lee, 33, 53.

Arnold, Sir Edwin 360.

– Matthew, 296-7, 360; letter of, to Mrs. Burton Harrison, 351-2.

Art Amateur, the, 314.

Art Interchange, the, 308.

Ashby, General Turner, death of, 87; opinion of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall

Jackson of, 87.

Ashgrove, 23.

Astor, Mrs., 278, 280.

Atherton, Mrs., 359.

Athens, 365.

Atlantic Monthly, the, 340.

Aus der Ohe, Adטle, 288, 324.

Authors’ Club, dinner of, 361.

Avenue de l’Imperatrice, the, soirיe at, 256.

Ayers and Wade, Messrs., editors of The Southern Illustrated News, 118.

B

Baez, President Bonaventura, negotiations of, with Grant’s commission, 299.

Baillie, Mr. Perce, mentioned in “A Little Centennial Lady,” 17.

Baker, Lieutenant A. W., 109.

Baldwin, George, 345.

Balfour, Mr., 360.

Baltimore, 40.

Baltimore Gazette, the account in, 265.

“Bandbox, Major,” nickname given Major Von Borcke, 130.

Bangs, John Kendrick, 341.

Page 372

Banks, Mr. A. D., 60, 61.

“Banner of the Jew, The,” 313.

“Baptism of Pocahontas, The,” 181.

Barbour, Colonel A. S., 59.

Barhamsville, battle of, 162.

Barker, Dr. Fordyce, 273.

Barlow, Miss Elsie, 291.

– Mrs. S. L. M., 291.

– S. L. M., 306.

Barnard, President F. A. P., 69; F. A. P., President of Columbia, 306.

– General, chief of the United States Engineer Corps, 201.

Baronne Brin, 250.

Barriיre de l’Etoile, 247.

Bartholdi, M., 315.

Bartholdi Pedestal Fund, the, 313.

Bartow, Brigadier-General, 47.

Bassano, Duc de, Emperor Napoleon III’s chamberlain, 254.

Bates, Mr., 224.

Battine, Captain Cecil, author of “Crisis of the Confederacy,” 175.

Battu, Marie, 254.

“Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” 71.

Bayne, Colonel T. L., 80.

Beach Hill, 350.

Beaman, Charles C., 345, 348

Beaufort, 74.

Beauregard, General Pierre Gustave Toutant, 47, 49, 51, 54; dinner with, 59,

222.

Beckfries, M., 357.

Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, 338-9.

Belasco, David, 330.

“Belhaven Tales,” stories by Mrs. Harrison, published in the Century Magazine,

26.

Bellevue, 304.

Belmont, Mrs., 278-279.

Belprי, 56; General Fitzhugh Lee at, 98.

Belvoir, 23; pronounced “Beever,” 36.

Benjamin, Judah P., 129, 160, 222, 223.

Bennett, John, 309.

Bentonville, battle of, 209.

Bermuda, the Nashville at, 77.

Bernhardt, Sarah, as Doסa Sol and as Adrienne Lecouvreur, 319, 323.

Berrian, Midshipman, 200.

Berwick-on-Tweed, 259.

Beverly Ford, death of Major Pelham at, 65-66.

Bierne, Miss Betty, 158; Miss Susan, 158.

Bigelow, Mr. John, 250, 300.

Bishop, Mme. Anna, 12.

Bisland, Miss Elisabeth, meeting of Mrs. Harrison with Coquelin at home of,

334-5.

Blackford, Rev. Lancelot, letter of, 92-93.

Blackwood’s Magazine, 131.

Blaine, James G., 351.

– Miss, 358.

Blair, Mr. Montgomery, 109.

– Hon. Francis Preston, 243.

“Bleak House,” home of Mr. Upton Herbert, 39.

Blouכt, M. Paul (Max O’Rell), 60.

Bodstein, Madame, 291.

Bois de Boulogne, 245; skating on, 251.

Bolling, Miss, 39.

Bonaparte, Jerome, 41.

Bonham, General, 54.

Boniface, Stella, in “School for Scandal,” 320-1.

Booth, Mrs. Agnes, 330.

– Edwin, 319.

Booth and Barrett in “Julius Cזsar,” 319.

Booth’s Theatre, 319.

Borcke, Colonel Von, 177.

Botetourt Springs, visit at, 86.

Botkine, M. Pierre, luncheon given by, to Mrs. Harrison, 357.

Boucicault, Dion, 320; in the “Shaughraun,” 321.

Boulevard Malesherbes, cotillon at, 259.

Bourdaloue, engagement of the Harwich off, 35.

Boyce, Congressman, 53.

– Colonel W.W., 59.

Boyesen, Professor, 338, 341.

Bozenta, Count, 324.

Braddock, General, 27.

Brand, Rev. Dr. William Francis, 69.

Brandon, home of the Harrisons, 155; shelled by United States gunboats, 264.

Branham, Longstreet, 252.

Brazil, the Empress of, 306.

“Bread-winners, The,” 356.

Breckinridge, General, 178, 222, 248;

Page 373

Secretary of War, telegram of, to President Davis, 208.

- Clifford, minister at St. Petersburg, 362.

Breese, Miss Eloise, 219.

“Bric-א-Brac Tales,” 313.

Brignoli, 294.

Bristoe, sound of battle heard at, 48.

Bristoe Station, arrival at, 46.

Brooks, Phillips, 37.

Brown, Isaac, sexton of Grace Church, 275, 316-318.

– Major R. W. as “Sir Lucius,” 176.

– James, servant of Burton Harrison, 217.

– Colonel Wilcox, 158.

– Mrs., 111.

Bryan, Captain Joseph, 179.

Bryant, William Cullen, 305, 324.

Bryces, the Smith, 252.

Bryton, Frederick, 330.

Buchanan, Battery, the, message from, to the Chickamauga, 197.

Buckner, General, 178.

Budaeus, William, 9.

Buel, Rev. Hillhouse, 11-12.

Buena Vista, Jefferson Davis at, 71.

“Bulbul, Clarence,” 8.

Bullion, Mrs., 296.

Bullock, Irving, 75.

Bull Run, 48.

Bunner, H. C., 338.

“Burial of Latane, The,” a picture painted by Captain William Washington, 179.

Burnett, Mrs., dinner of Authors’ Club given to, 361.

Burr, Aaron 21.

Burton, General, 264, 266-7-8.

Butler, General, 193.

– Prescott Hall, 332.

– Mrs. Francis Kemble, 322.

C

Cabell, Major Caskie, 179.

– Evelyn, 156.

– Miss Lizzie, 159.

Cable, George W., 344.

Californie, Hotel, 367.

Cameron, country home of General Cooper, 38.

– Mrs. Don, 155, 358.

Campanini at the Academy of Music, 285-6.

Campbell, Judge John Archibald, 154.

– Miss Mary Ellen, 154.

– Judge, 216.

Cannes, Mrs. Harrison at, 365.

Capoul, M., 256, 292, 293.

Carabas, the Marquis, 41.

Carlyle, Mr., visit of John R. Thompson to, 121-2; “Reminiscences,” edited by

Froude, R. Thompson mentioned in, 122-3.

Carnegie, Andrew, 344.

Carroll, Professor Charles, 338.

Carter, James C., 348.

– Captain Shirley, 179.

Carter Hall, 44.

Cary, Archibald, of Carysbrooke, son of Wilson Jefferson Cary, 3; wedding
journey of, 8-9.

– Colonel Archibald, of Ampthill, known as “Old Iron,” his marriage to Miss

Randolph, 5.

– Clarence, 9-10; at the battle of Manassas, 52; receives commission as
midshipman, 53; courier to General Longstreet, 53; assigned as aid to

Secretary Mallory, 81-82; in charge of money taken from New Orleans, 81, 177;
passed midshipman, 189; ordered aboard, 189; diary of, 197-200; letter of, to
sister, 199-200; cheered by both armies at Fort Fisher, 201; bursting of gun
of, 206; at Fort Jackson, 81, 167; in charge of boat load of deserters, 80;
diary of, kept on the cruise of the Chickamauga, discovered by Commander

Parker, 192-3-4; meeting with Harvard man at Rio, 262; ships before the mast
in the bark Clifton, 260-1; in New York, 262; visit to Europe, 362.

- Miss Constance, letter written to, by General Van Dorn, 61-62; letter
written to General Van Dorn by, 62; flag presented to Washington Artillery,

79; letter of, to mother and brother, April 4, 1865, 210-215.

– Captain Wilson Miles, 202, 204.

– Elizabeth, of Ceelys, 17.

– Falkland, brother of Mrs. Harrison, 9; mentioned, 30, 40.

Page 374

– Hetty, 57; ordered to leave Baltimore by the Federal government, 58; flag
sent to General J. E. Johnston by, 61, 67, 116, 128, 129, 141, 160, 174, 177,

190; engagement of and marriage to General Pegram, 201.

– Jennie, Randall’s poem “Maryland” set to music by, 57; flag sent by, to

General Beauregard, 61, 67.

– John Brune, 156.

– Lucius, Viscount Falkland, 5.

– Mrs., her letters and essays, 4, 185, 205, 241, 243; death of, 303-4.

– Wilson Miles, 57.

– Mrs. Wilson Miles, 201.

– Wilson Jefferson, marriage with Mrs. Virginia Randolph at Monticello, 3.

“Cary Invincibles,” the organization of, 59-60; invited to headquarters
dinner, 60.

Cary Street, 148.

Cary & Whitridge, law firm of, 199.

Caserta de Comte, 367.

Caskie, Major Willie, 179.

Caux, Marquis de, 323.

Cavanagh, Confederate soldier, wounded at Camp Winder, 184.

Cayvan, Miss Georgia, as “Lisette” in Octave Feuillet’s “Portraits of the

Marquise,” 327-8.

Cedar Mountain, 92.

Centennial Exhibition, the Philadelphia, 303.

Central Park, 275.

Centreville, Union headquarters at, 105.

Century Magazine, the, 64, 220, 340.

Champney, Mrs. J. W., anecdote told by, at the Woman’s Club of Sorosis, 339.

Champs Elysיes, the, 253.

Chancellorsville, battle of, 137; description of the battle of, in the “Crisis
of the Confederacy,” 175.

Chapman, Conrad Wise, 181.

– Mary, 88.

– John G., 181.

Charlotte, 225.

Charlottesville, 40.

Chauncey, Henry, 329.

Chestney, Major Theodore, 179.

– Miss Josephine as ” Fannie Squeers,” 173.

Chestnut, Mrs., 128; visit of Miss Cary to, 148-9, 155.

– General, letter from, 74, 149, 179.

Chickamauga, the, C. S. S., attack on the Union fleet by, 95, 189, 193; cruise
of, 194-5-6-7; struck by a gale at Fort Fisher, 197.

Chilton, Colonel, 72.

Choate, Joseph H., 306, 348.

Churchman, the, 331.

Church Musical Association, the, organization of and rehearsals, 287; first
public concert given by, 288.

Cirque de l’Impיratrice, the, 257.

Civilian, The Cumberland, a newspaper edited by Mr. Archibald Cary, 7, 12.

Clarendon Hotel, the, 293.

Clay, Mrs. Clement, 156; as “Mrs. Malaprop,” 176.

– Henry, Mrs. Harrison’s meeting with, 7.

Clayton, Miss Estelle, 330.

Cleveland, Miss Rose Elizabeth, 332.

Clifton, 260.

Clifton House, the Carys and Fairfaxes at, 67-68; Burton Harrison at, 70, 77.

Clingman, Hon. Mr., 60, 178.

Clotilde, Princess, 258.

Cluny, Musיe de, 247.

Cockburn, Sir Alexander, opinions of, 194-5.

Coffey, Captain Edward Lees, 158.

Coghlan, Rose, 320.

Collyer, Rev. Robert, 344.

Colross, home of Mr. A. P. Mason, 154.

Columbia, Union raid on, 74.

Compטigne, 258, 367.

“Confederate Album,” the, 208.

Constantinople, visit of Mrs. Harrison to, 364-5.

Conway, Miss Champe, 156.

Cooke, John Esten, 118, 179.

Cooper Edward, 301, 345.

– Mrs. Edward, 38, 284.

– General Samuel, United States Adjutant-General in Washington, 38, 154,

222.

– Peter, 301.

Copenhagen, 362.

Coquelin, M., at the Nineteenth Century Club, 335.

Page 375

Corbin, Gawin, 248.

– Mr. Francis, 248.

– Richard, letter of, to George Washington, 248.

Corbins, the ancestors of, 248.

Corinth, 65.

Cornelius, 68.

Cortina, 33.

Coudert, Mr., 335-6, 344.

Coward, Edward Fales, 332.

Craigie, Mrs. (John Oliver Hobbes), 359.

Cranbrooke Hall, home of Mrs. Walford, 359.

Crane, Walter, illustrator, 313.

Craven, Miss, 329.

“Crescent and the Cross,” the, 307.

Crescent, the New Orleans, tribute to Miss Hetty Cary in, 58-59.

Crךve-Coeur, Mme. la Marquise de, 68.

“Crisis of the Confederacy,” the, 175.

“Critic, The,” performance of, 321.

Critic, The, magazine, 340, 356.

Cross, Mr. J. W., 273, 360.

Cruger, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, 341.

Culpeper Court House, 49; Mrs. Harrison’s mother at, 55, 77, 99.

Cumberland, town of, 7, 13.

Curtis, Dr. Holbrook, 357.

– George William, 306, 338.

Curtis Hotel, 322.

Curzon, Lord, 360.

Custer, Mrs., 308.

Custis, Mr. George Washington Parke, “The Old Man Eloquent,” 33.

Cutts, Mrs. Richard, 25.

D

“Dahlian God, Ye,” 31.

Daingerfield, Miss Mary, 110.

d’Alencon, Duchesse, 368.

Daly, Augustin, 321.

Daly’s Theatre, 321.

Dana, Charles A., 306.

Daniel, Captain Travers, 179.

– Miss Frances, 156.

– John M., editor of the Richmond Examiner, 119.

Danville, 208.

d’Arblay, Madame, 32.

Davenport, 320.

Davidson, Mrs., 12.

Davis, Jefferson, 61; inauguration of, 68-69; in Richmond 71-73, at

Mechanicsville, 72, 73, 74, 129, 137, 223; anxiety for his wife, 224; speech
made by, to General Basil Duke’s command, 224; receives news of Lincoln’s
assassination, 224; capture of, by Federal troops, 226-8, release and trial
of, 263-8.

– Mrs. Jefferson, at the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, 70, 126; reception
of, 127; at capture of Jefferson Davis, 129, 202, 221, 227, 268, 269.

– “Joe,” death of, 181-2.

– Hon. George, Attorney-General in Jefferson Davis’s cabinet, 165, 222, 267.

– Judge, 358.

– Richard Harding, 356.

– Monimia, 165.

– Winnie, 269.

Dawson, Captain Frank, 179.

– Mrs., 155

Deane, Miss Adeline, marriage of, 79.

– Dr., reception at house of, 79.

Deas, Colonel George, 178.

de Janon, Mlle., 301.

de Kay, Mr. Charles, 158.

Delaware, Fort, 240-2; imprisonment of Burton Harrison at, 243.

de Leon, Mr. Cooper, 130.

de Lespinasse, Mlle. Julie, 159.

de Lille et d’Albion, Hotel, 245.

Delmonico’s, dinner at, 315-7.

Denטgre, Captain Joseph, 135, 167, 170, 174.

Depew, Mr. Chauncey, 290.

de Peyster, Frederic, 345.

“Diner des Rois,” 247.

Dix, General, 244, 251; governor, 305.

Doane, Monsignor, 310.

Dobbin, Mr. Robert, 146, 174; as coachman, 177.

Dodge, Colonel Harrison, 36.

Dolomites, the, 33.

“Don Giovanni,” 61.

Dougherty, Mr., 341.

Douglas, Colonel Henry Kyd, 179; letter of, describing imprisonment of Burton

Harrison at Fort Delaware, 240.

– Mrs. Stephen A., 25.

Page 376

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 360.

Drake, A. W., 315.

– Mrs., 333-4.

Draper, Dr. William, 342.

– Mrs. William, 342.

– Professor Henry M., 344.

“Dream of the Thursday Evening Club of the Future,” the, 340.

Drew, John, 321, 334.

Drinkwater, Mrs., routing of the officers of the Chickamauga by, 197.

Drury’s Bluff, 82.

Dubois, M., 282-3.

Dufferin, Lord, 284.

Dumfries, 54.

Duquesne, Fort, 20.

Dyas, Miss Ada, 330.

E

Eastport, 54.

Edwards in “School for Scandal,” 320.

Eggleston, Dr., 338.

Egypt, 365.

Eliot, George, 32.

Elkton’s Landing, 162.

Ellerson’s Mill, 72.

“Elsie Venner,” 170.

Elzey, General, 137, 178.

Emmet, Miss Rosina, 312.

Emperor, the, Napoleon III, 255.

Ems, the, steamer, 364.

Eshleman, Captain B. F., flag sent to the Washington Artillery at request of,

78.

Essipoff, 288.

Ephemeron, The, table of contents of, 340; repeated before the Thursday

Evening Club, 340-1.

Eugיnie, Empress, 251.

Evening Sun, New York, the, 356.

Examiner, the, Miss Cary’s poem accepted by, 119.

Exposition Universelle, review of troops in honor of, 262-3.

Eyre, Gerald, in “School for Scandal,” 320.

Ezekiel, Chevalier Moses, work of, 180.

F

Fairfax, Albert, 15.

– Anne, marriage with Lawrence Washington, first mistress of Mount Vernon,

35.

– Brian, 35.

– Dr., 67; loss of fortune of, 85,165, 219.

– Ethelbert, 209.

– George, his friendship with George Washington, 35.

– Henry, of Ashgrove, 15.

– Hannah, marriage to Warner Washington, 35.

– Jennie, 67.

– Lieutenant Donald, U. S. N., 76.

– Lord, title confirmed by the House of Lords in 1908, 36; his inscription
in the Visitors’ Book at Belvoir, 36.

– Lord, of Greenway Court, his visits at Belvoir House, on the Potomac, 34.

– Lord, ninth Baron of Cameron, 7; goes to England to take possession of an
inheritance, 19-20.

– Monimia, wife of Archibald Cary and youngest daughter of Lord Fairfax, 7,

8.

– Mr. and Mrs. George William, 20.

– Orlando, 15.

– Randolph, 30; mentioned in letter of Rev. Lancelot Blackford, 92-93; death
of, at Fredericksburg, 95-96.

– Reginald, 15; death of, 84.

– Sally, diary of, published in Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1876, 17.

– Sarah, of Belvoir, invited to dine with Mr. and Mrs.Washington, 20.

– Thomas, killed on the Harwich, 35.

– Colonel William, of Belvoir, 20.

Fairfax Court House, the, 30, 52, 54.

“Fare Fac,” motto of the Fairfax family, 36.

Faubourg St. Germain, Teresa at, 253.

Fauquier White Sulphur Springs, 87.

Fearn, Mr. Walker, 296.

– Mrs. Walker, 244.

Feast of Candles, the, 255.

Fechter, 320.

Federal Government, the, 166.

Ferguson, Captain “Wragge,” 179.

Feuillet, Octave, letter from, to Mrs. Harrison, 328.

Field, Mr. David Dudley, 221, 274, 300.

Page 377

Field, Mr. Cyrus, 300.

– Rev. Henry M., dinner at home of, 221.

– Miss Kate, 344.

Fifth Avenue Theatre, the, 319.

Fish, Mrs. Hamilton, 278, 280.

Fisher, Colonel, 53.

Fisher, Fort, 193.

Fiske, Mrs., 326-7.

Fitzhugh, Mrs., of Ravensworth, 39.

Flint stone, 12.

Florence, 284.

“Folk and Fairy Tales,” 313.

Forbes, Mr., as “Uncle Toby,” 173.

Four Seasons Hotel, the, 356.

Fourteenth Street Theatre, the, 320.

France et Choiseul, the Hotel, 269.

Fraser, Captain James, 179.

“Frayser’s Farm,” battle of, 132.

Fredericksburg, battle of, 95.

Freeland, Miss Maria, 176.

Freeman, Max, 330.

Freemantle, Lieutenant-Colonel, author of “Three Months in the Southern

States,” 133.

Frostburg, 12.

Fullerton, ex-Judge, 244.

G

Gallifet, Marquise de, 258.

Galt, Aiexander, 181.

Garibaldi, 161.

Garibondy, Chגteau, 367.

Garvarni, duet with, 256.

Gautier’s, 24.

Gilmer, General, 209.

Gerard, Mr. James W., 300.

Gerster, Madame Etelka, 294.

Gettysburg, battle of, 141.

Gibraltar, 365.

Gibson, Dr. Charles Bell, home of, 159.

– Charles Dana, 355.

– Mary, 159.

– Mrs., 159.

Gilbert in “School for Scandal,” 320.

Gilder, Miss Jeannette, 353.

– Joseph, 356.

– Richard Watson, letter from, 220, 341; visit of Mrs. Harrison to office
of, 353.

Gildersleeve, Captain Basil, 178.

Giles, Miss Lizzie Peyton, 156; as “Penitent,” 173.

“Glendale,” battle of, 132.

Glenesk, Lord, 360; dinner given by, 365-6.

Glenn, Wilkins, 265.

Godwin, Mr. Parke, 251, 324-5; member of lecture committee of Nineteenth

Century Club, 343.

“Golden Rod,” 303.

Gordon, General, 178.

Gosse, Edmund, 360.

“Gotterdהmmerung,” the, 297.

Gottheil, Rabbi, 343.

Grace Church, 317.

Gracie, General, 178.

Gramercy Park, 251; home of the Harrisons at, 300.

Grand Hotel, dinner given to Mr. Bigelow at, 251.

Greensboro, conference at, 222.

Greenway Court, 35.

Gregor, Mr., 357.

Gregory, Miss Alice, 39.

Grenfell, Mme., school of, 244.

Gulager, Mrs., 290-1.

Gunnell, Harry, 17.

Gunston Hall, home of George Mason, 38.

Gwin, ex-Senator, and Mrs., of California, 250; ball at home of, 253-4.

Gymnase Theatre, the, 246.

H

Hall, Emily D., the, captured by the Chickamauga, 196.

Hamilton, William G., 300.

Hampton, Preston, 129; death of, 162-3.

– Lieutenant Wade, 162.

Hardiman, “Tony,” 242.

Hardy, Thomas, 360.

Harlem Kills, the, 41.

Harper’s Weekly, 68, 303.

Harrison, Burton, 57; private secretary to Jefferson Davis, 69; receipt of a
package of paper from, 117-8; 149, 182, 202, 203, 205; letter of Miss Cary to,

217-8, 220; joins Jefferson Davis at Danville, 221; escort of, with Jefferson

Davis, 225; description of Davis’s capture by, 226; as prisoner of war

228-237; mentioned in letter of

Page 378

Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, 241; visit of Miss Cary to, in prison, 243; release
of, from Fort Delaware, 243-4, 252; two letters of, describing release and
trial of Jefferson Davis, 263-8; marriage of, to Miss Cary, 271, 299; kindness
to ex-Confederate soldiers, 301-2; secretary and counsel of the Rapid Transit

Company, 302; counsel for the Western Union Telegraph Company and New York

Telephone Company, 302, 342; secretary of University Dining Club, 345; refusal
of, to accept appointment as ambassador to Italy, 365.

– Belle, 264.

– Mrs. George, nיe Gordon, 155, 264.

– Francis Burton, 4, 299-300.

– Fairfax, present owner of Belvoir, in Fanquier County, Virginia, 35.

– Mrs. Samuel, 217.

Hartington, Marquis of, 132.

Hartranft, General, 236.

Harvey Birch, the, sunk by the Nashville, 75.

Harwich, the, British man-of-war, sunk by the French, 35.

Hatcher’s Run, battle of, 160.

Haven, Mr. George, 295.

Havre, 244.

Hawthorne, Julian, 338, 341.

Haxall, Mr. Barton, 158.

– Charlotte, 158.

– Miss Harriet, 158.

– Miss Lucy, 158.

– Captain Philip, 158.

Hay, John, 356; tea given to Mrs. Harrison by, 358.

Hayes, Brigadier-General, 105; message sent by, to General Ewell, 110-1.

Hayne, Paul H., 118.

Hearn, Lafcadio, 334.

Herbert, Arthur, of Muckross, 39.

– Margaret, grandmother of Mrs. Harrison, 19, 20.

– Mr. Upton, 39.

– Michael, 358.

– Nancy, meeting with Aaron Burr, 21; carried in chair by U.S. soldiers from
her home at Vaucluse, 32.

Herndon, Miss, as the “Widow Wadman,” 173.

“Heroine, The” 60.

Hewitt, Abram, 301.

– Marie, 244.

– Mrs., 244.

Higgins, Captain Royal George, 349.

Hincks, Mrs. Pemberton, 334.

“History of the American People,” 219.

Hohenzollern, Princess, 368.

Holly Springs, 65.

Hollywood, 84; burial of Confederates at, 188.

Holmes, General, 54.

– Oliver Wendell, 309, 344.

Holt, Judge Advocate-General, 229.

Hood, General, 162, 172-3, 177.

Hooe, Lieutenant, 59.

– Mrs. Philip, 110.

Hope, James Barron, 118.

– Anthony, 360.

Howe, Julia Ward, 344.

Howell, Miss, 70, 227, 268; sister of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, 128.

– Midshipman Jefferson Davis, 179.

– “Jeff,” a brother of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, 262.

Howells, William Dean, 338.

Howland, Judge, 342, 345, 348.

Hunt, Mr. Richard, 342.

Hunter, General, 87.

- Mr., 17.

Hurst, Mr., 17.

Husted Act, the, 302.

Hyde, Mrs., leaves Vaucluse to go to the front as a nurse, 32, 97, 114; at

Camp Winder as nurse, 182, 215.

– Meta, 23, 44, 216.

– Reginald, 82.

I

“Idיes de Mme. Aubray, Les,” 246.

Imperial, the Prince, 255; death of, 366.

Imperiali, Marquis, 357.

Indian Chief, the, Confederate receiving ship, mutiny on, 95.

Ingersoll, Miss Justine, 327.

- Robert G., 344.

Invalides, the, 247.

Irving, Henry, as “Matthias” in “The Bells,” 320, 336.

Page 379

Irwin, Mrs., Mrs. Harrison’s visits to, 25-26, 42, 108.

Irwinsville, Mrs. Davis found by Jefferson Davis at, 226.

Iuka, 65.

J

Jackson, Stonewall, 89; death of, 138-141.

“Jackson’s Way, Stonewall,” lyric, 138-140.

Jacobi, Dr. Mary Putnam, 344.

James, Henry, 360.

Jefferson, Thomas, 3.

– Martha, 3.

Jenkins, General, 178.

Jerningham, Sir Hubert, 259.

Jerome, William Travers, 343.

Jerrold, Mrs. Blanchard, 256.

Joachim, 304.

Johns, Bishop, 37.

Johnson, President, 243.

– Bartlett S., letter of, to Clarence Cary, 198-9.

Johnston, Alan, 358.

– Colonel Preston, 178, 225; capture of, with Jefferson Davis, 226.

– General Albert Sydney, 24, 178; relieved of his command by Lee, 192.

– General Edward, 178.

– Mrs. Joseph E., 154.

– General J. E., 222.

Jones, Mrs. F. R., 341.

Joseffy, 288.

K

Kellogg, Clara Louise, 324.

Kenah, Miss Jane, school of, 11.

Kernochan, Frank, 345.

Kieff, 362.

King, Clarence, 358.

Kingsley, Rose, 359.

– Canon Charles, 359.

King William County, 141-2; observations of colored folk of, 142-5.

Kipling, Rudyard, 360.

“Knighthood,” 172-3.

Kronstadt, Father John, of, 363.

L

La Basse Motte, home of General de la Charette, 163.

“Lady of Quality, A,” 361.

Lamar, Congressman L. Q. C., 69, 160, 202, 252.

Lane, Miss Harriet, at Mount Vernon, 34.

Lathrop, George Parsons, 337, 341.

Laughton, Mrs. Macalester, 332.

Lawley, Hon. Francis, 132.

Lawrence, Miss, 358.

Lawton, General, 178, 209.

Lay, Mrs., 154.

Lazarus, Miss Emma, 313.

Lee, Anne Carter, 91.

– General Custis, 40, 178, 203.

– Daniel Murray, 155, 198.

– Mrs. Fitzhugh, 153.

– General Fitzhugh, at President Cleveland’s inauguration, 99, 101; ride
from Belprי, 99, 174, 177.

– Miss Mary Custis, 33, 153.

– Mildred, faces two angry dogs at Cortina, 33.

– Robert E., 25; his family, 33, 72; gratitude of the South toward, 89;
letter of, to the father of Randolph Fairfax, 96-97; visit of, to Miss Cary,

127; ladies of his family, 153; statue of, 180.

– Mrs. R.E., 153.

– Private R. E., son of General R. E. Lee, meeting with his father at

Sharpsburg, 90-91; visit of, at Belvoir House, 91.

– Admiral Sidney Smith, brother of General R. E. Lee, 38, 89, 155, 198.

– Mrs. S. S., 155.

– General William Henry Fitzhugh, 39, 178.

Leeds Castle, home of Charles Wykeham Martin, 269; visit at, 269-270.

Lefebvre, Mr. Hubert Pierre, 41.

Lefebvre’s School, 158.

Leiter, Mrs., 332.

– Miss Mary, 358.

Leland, Charles Godfrey, 126.

Lemon, Mark, 256.

Lenox, summer at, 309-310.

Lיotard, 257.

Letcher, Governor, 137.

Letellier, Mme., sister of Alexandre Dumas, 246.

Leveson-Gore, Frederick, 366.

Lemoyne, Mrs., 324, 334.

– William J., 330.

Life, 298.

Page 380

Lincoln, Abraham, Mrs. Harrison’s meeting with, 43, 219.

– “Tad,” 219.

Lincoln, Albion, the, captured by the Chickamauga, 196.

Linden Row, gatherings at Mrs. Pegram’s house at, 160.

Lipscomb, Mr., 49.

“Little Centennial Lady, A,” title of diary of Sally Fairfax, published in

Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1876, extracts from, 17-19, 303.

Lobanoff, Prince, 363.

Lochiel Hotel, meeting of Burton Harrison and General Hartranft at, 237.

Lodge, Mrs. Cabot, 358.

London Illustrated News, the, 132, 133.

London, Mrs. Harrison’s visit to, 358.

London Times, the, 132.

Long Bridge, 24.

Longchamps, 254.

Longridge Towers, home of Sir Hubert Jerningham, 259.

Longstreet, General, 47; wounded, 182.

“Loop Around Europe,” the, 362.

Lubbock, Colonel Frank R., 178, 225.

Lyceum Theatre, 327.

M

Madeleine, the, Christmas mass at, 247.

Madison, Mrs. Dolly, 53.

Madison Square Theatre, play for charity at, 330; “Authors’ Readings” at,

337-340.

“Magic Flute,” the, opera, 256.

Magnolia Weekly, the, 118.

Majestic, the, 356.

Malet, Lucas, 359.

Mallory, Rev. Dr., 327, 331.

– Marshall, 330.

– Secretary, 81, 126.

– Mr., 222.

Malter, 365.

Manassas Junction, 44; battle of, 52; information received from Mrs. Greenow
enabling Confederates to win battle of, 53-54; Mrs. Harrison’s visit to, after
the battle, 56; guns captured by the Washington Artillery at, 79.

Mann, Colonel Dudley, 248; letter of, to President Davis, 249-250.

Manning, Governor, 60, 179.

Mansfield, Richard, in “A Parisian Romance,” 320; as “Richard III,” 321.

Mansion House, the, Alexandria, 28-29.

Marbeuf, the Avenue, 252.

Mariי, Galli, 256.

Markham, Sir Clements, 350, 360.

Marks, Montague, editor of the Art Amateur, 314.

Marnas, Count de, 254.

Martin, Mr. de Saint, 222.

– Charles Wykeham, 269.

Martindale, Brigadier-General, 108.

Martinsburg, 54.

“Maryland, My,” sung by Miss Jennie Cary, 57-58, 60.

Mason, Miss Emily, 38.

– George, father of Mrs. General Cooper, 38.

– Arthur Pendleton, 154.

– Major Robert, 100.

– Ethelbert, 216.

– Alexander, 329.

Mathilde, Princess, 258.

Maurin, Major Victor, 225.

Maximilian, Emperor, 368.

May, Rev. Dr., 37.

McAllister, Ward, 277, 357.

McCabe, Captain Gordon, 179; letter written by, 204.

McCarty, Captain Page, 179.

McCosh, Dr., 310.

McCullough, General, 178.

McDowell, General, 54.

“McGillicuddy, Irene,” 291.

McGuire, Mrs. Judith Brockenborough, mention of Vaucluse in diary of, 45.

McGuires, the, of Howard, 38.

McHenry, James Howard, 269.

McLean, Colonel and Mrs., 156.

McMurdo, Miss Saidee, 68.

McMurdos, the party at home of, 68.

Meade, Bishop, 178.

– General, 146.

Mechanicsville, battle of, 88-89.

Mehlig, Mme. Anna, 288, 290.

Memminger, Mr., reception-room of, 190.

Mendelssohn Glee Club, concert given by, 295.

Page 381

Menken, Adah Isaacs, 246.

Mercedita, the, U. S. S., battle with the Palmetto State and Chickamauga, 95.

Metropolitan Opera House, the, 295; first season of, 298.

Metternich, Princess, 253; at theatricals given at Compטigne, 258.

“Mignon,” the, opera, 256.

“Mikado,” the, opera, 319.

Miles, Hon. William Porcher, 158.

Millwood, 44, 46.

Minnegerode, Dr., 138, 203, 215, 267.

Miranda, Countess, Christine Nilsson, as, 257.

Mississippi, the, Confederate ironclad, 80.

“Mistletoe Bough, The,” 306.

Mitchel, Mr. John, 119.

Mobile, 81.

Modjeska, Mme., 319, 324.

Monroe, Fortress, imprisonment of Jefferson Davis at, 228.

Montague, Harry, in “Romeo and Juliet,” 319.

Monte Carlo, 257.

Monticello, marriage of Wilson Jeffferson Cary and Miss Virginia Randolph at,

3.

Montsaulnin, Countess de, 244.

Monumental, the old service at, 215.

Moore, Tom, 41.

Moorings, the, 44.

Morgan, General, 178.

– Midshipman James Morris, 179.

– Colonel James Morris, letter of, to Mrs. Harrison, 199, 262.

– Governor, 305.

Morley, Lord, 360.

Morphy, Mr., 136.

Morris, Mrs. Gouverneur, letter to, from Archibald Cary, 5.

– Gouverneur, 40.

– Anne Cary, 269.

– Clara, in “A Parisian Romance,” 320.

Morrisania, the home of Gouverneur Morris, 40-41; Miss Cary’s visit to,

239-240; Clarence Cary at, 262, 275.

Moscow, 363.

Mott Haven, 275.

Moulton, Mrs. Chandler, 359.

Mount Vernon, visit of the Prince of Wales to, 34; dining-room at, 36.

Mount Vernon Aid Society, the, organization of, 305-8.

Muckross, home of Arthur Herbert, 39.

Munford, Lieutenant-Colonel William, 59, 179.

– Colonel George, 161.

– Ellis, death of, at Malvern Hill, 161.

Myers, Mrs., 155-6, 250.

– General A. S., 155-6.

– Captain William, 157.

N

Naples, 364.

Napoleon, Prince, 258.

Nashville, the, convoy of Mason and Slidell, 74-75; escapes from the
blockading squadron off Fort Macon, 77, 179, 249.

Nation, the, 303.

Nebuchadnezzar, Uncle, 167-9.

Neilson, Adelaide, in “Romeo and Juliet,” 319.

Newbury, 5.

“New Colossus, The,” 313-4.

Newport Mountain, 350.

News, the Illustrated London, 26.

Newton, Rev. Dr. Heber, 344.

“New Vagabonds” Club, the, dinner at, 360-1.

New York Hotel, the, Jefferson Davis at, 268.

New York society in the seventies, 270, 273, 286.

Nicholas, Mary Spear, 264.

Nijni-Novgorod, 363.

Nilsson, Christine, as the “Queen of Night” in the “Magic Flute,” 256, 292-3,

324.

Nineteenth Century Club, the, 335; organization of, 342-4; death of founder of
mentioned, 344.

Norris, Dr. Herbert, 238, 242.

– Mrs., 238.

O

O’Conor, Mr. Charles, 244; attorney at trial of Jefferson Davis, 265-6, 298.

Ogden, Mr. R. D’Orsey, 216.

“Old-Fashioned Fairy Book,” the, 312.

Page 382

Oliphant, Laurence, 291, 297.

Oliver, Robert, 310.

Opיra Comique, the, 256.

Orange and Alexandria Railroad, the, 46, 105.

O’Reilly, John Boyle, 338.

Osborne, Mrs., 304.

Ould, Miss Mattie, 159.

– General Robert, 159.

Owen, Captain William Miller, author of “In Camp and Battle with the

Washington Artillery,” 78.

Oxford University, Mississippi, 69.

P

Packard, Rev. Dr., 37.

Page, Mr. William, 17.

– Miss Molly, mentioned in “A Little Centennial Lady,” 17.

– Captain Legh, 179.

– S. D., 244.

Pagerie, Duchesse Tascher de la, 258.

Paget, Lady Alfred, 367.

Palestine, 365.

Palmer, 138.

– Cortland, 301, 342-3.

Palmer’s Theatre, 320.

Palmerston, Lord, visit to the Nashville, 75.

Palmetto State, the, Confederate ironclad, attacked by Union fleet, 95.

Pamunkey fever, 190.

Pamunkey Swamps, the, 190.

Pantheon, the, 56.

Paris, winter at, 245; exposition of, 269.

Parker, Sir Gilbert, 360.

– Lieutenant-Commander James, U. S. N., 193.

Parkman, Mrs., 158.

Parsons, John E., 298.

Pasdeloup’s orchestra, 257.

Patrick Henry, the, school-ship, 116.

Patterson, General, 54.

– Judge, 348.

Patti, Adelina, at Maseilles, 252, 323.

Paul, Mattie, 157.

Pauncefote, Sir Julian, 357.

– Miss, 357.

– Lady, 357.

Pea Ridge, 65.

Pech, Dr., 287.

Peck, General, U. S. A., 212.

Pegram, Captain Robert, 74, 75, 249.

– William, 160.

– Mrs., 160.

– Colonel William, death of, 205.

– General John, 160; marriage of, to Hetty Cary, 201; death of, 204-5.

– Jennie, 157.

Pelham, Major, 65, 66.

“Pen,” dramatis personז, 173.

Perkins, Miss, 358.

Pיtrovitch, “Dieu-Donnי,” 253; at the state ball, 258.

Peyton, Colonel, 202.

Philharmonic orchestra, the, French musician in, 304-5.

Philharmonic Society, the concerts of, 294-5.

Phillips, Miss Adelaide, 290, 294.

Piatt, Mrs., 341.

Pickens, Camp, life at, 47, 111.

Pierrepont, Miss, 280.

Pinchot, Miss Nettie, 358.

Plantagenet, Byron, Viscount Falkland, 5.

Playfair, Lord, 360.

“Pocahontas, Baptism of, The,” a picture painted by Chapman, 8.

Podestad, Ella, Marquise de, 88.

Polignac, Prince Camille de, 131, 248.

Polk, Miss Antoinette, 163; ride of, to warn relatives at Ashwood Hall, 164.

Ponisi, Mme., in “School for Scandal,” 320.

Pontי, da, Captain Durant, 61; description of arrival of flag at Van Dorn’s
headquarters by, 63.

Porte Maillot, the, 245.

Porter, Admiral, 193.

– General Horace, 335.

– Dr., 349.

“Portfolio,” Mrs. Harrison’s, 314.

Potter, Clarkson, 274.

– Henry, 37.

– Bishop, 340.

– James Brown, 357.

– Mrs. James Brown, 329, 332.

Potter, Mark L., the, captured by the Chickamauga, 196.

Page 383

Pratt, Mrs., 250.

Preston, General John S., family of, 154.

– Miss Sally, 178.

– Miss Mary, 172.

Price, Professor Thomas R., 130.

Pritchard, Colonel, 226.

Probיdenotsעf, 363.

Pryor, General Roger A., 178.

Punch, 75, 256.

R

Radcliffe, Mrs., 67.

Randolph Anne, 41.

– General George, Confederate Secretary of War, 79, 176.

– Mrs., wife of Confederate Secretary of War, 79, 172; entertainment given
by, 172-8.

– Isham, 3.

– Innis, 179.

– Jane, mother of Jefferson, 3.

– John, of Roanoke, 5.

– Mr. John, as “Sir Anthony,” 176.

– Thomas Mann, 3.

– Miss Virginia, 3.

Rappahannock, the, 113.

Rappahannock Station, 112.

Ravensworth, 39.

Reade, Miss Mary, 5.

Reagan, Mr., 222, 225.

“Rebel,” the war horse ridden by the colonel of the Washington Artillery at

Malvern Hill, 79.

“Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer,” 163.

Redlands, 216.

Reed, Lieutenant, 81.

– Mr., attorney at trial of Jefferson Davis, 266.

“Refugitta,” a mare loaned to Miss Cary by General Lee, 100, 125.

Rehan, Miss, 321.

Reid, Whitelaw, 306.

Rendel, Lord, 366.

“Retreat, The,” Christmas at, 167-9; house party at, 189-190.

Revue des Deux Mondes, the, 274.

“Richmond Scenes in ‘62,” 71.

Richmond, spring in, 77.

Rigolboche, 253.

Ringgold, George, 319.

Ristori, Adelaide, as “Marie Stuart” and as “Marie Antoinette,” 320.

Ritchie, Miss Jenny, 267.

– Mrs. Richmond, 358-9.

– Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, 322-3.

Rives, Mr. Alfred, 68.

– Amיlie, 86.

Robert, Jefferson Davis’s negro servant, 225.

Robinson, Mrs., as “Light of the Harem” in “Tent,” 173.

– Captain Henry, 158.

– Captain John Moncure, 156, 248.

– Leigh, 40.

– Russell, 156.

Roby, Lieutenant, 199-200.

Roman, Mr. Philip, 13.

Ronalds, Mrs., 291.

Ronconi, duet with, 289-290; lessons given by, 288-290.

Roosevelt, Colonel, 76, 344.

– Mrs. Theodore, 278-9; ball given by, 279.

– Mr. Hilborne, 292.

– Mr., uncle of Colonel Roosevelt, 292.

Ropes, John Codman, 93.

Ross, Dr. George, 179.

Rotch, Arthur, 349.

Rousseau, tomb of, 56.

“Rowens, Mrs. Marilla,” 171.

Rubenstein, 288.

Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria, 366, 368.

Rue Lord Byron, the, 154, 250.

Ruggles, Samuel B., 300, 306.

“Russian Honeymoon, A,” production of, 330-2; production of, at the Madison

Square Theatre, at Brooklyn, and at Washington, 332.

Rutherford, Mrs. Lewis Morris, 278, 280, 291.

– Stuyvesant, 280.

S

Saint Bernard Pass, Grand, 269.

Saint Chapelle, the, 247.

Saint Martin, Mr. Jules de, 79-80.

Salle des Marיchaux, the, their Majesties at, 258.

Salle l’Athיnיe, concert at the, 257.

Salvini, 285-6; as “Samson,” 321.

Samana Bay Company, the, 299.

Samuels, Captain Samuel B., 299.

Sandford, Mr. William, 17.

Page 384

Saratoga, 44.

Saturday Review, estimate of Ronconi in, 289.

Saunders, Colonel John S., 158, 174.

Schermerhorn, Mr. Edmund, 291, 292.

– The Misses, 291.

Schoeff, General, 241.

Schuyler, Mr., 305.

– Eugene, 244, 275.

Scott, Sir Walter, 97.

– General, 53.

Scribner’s Magazine, 240, 303.

Scribner’s Sons, Charles, 308.

Seal, John, 17.

Sea Urchins, home of the Harrisons at Bar Harbor, 350.

Seddon, Mr., Secretary of War, 138.

Sedgwick Hall, 310.

Sefton, Mr., 320.

Seligman, Joseph, 302.

Seminary, Theological, services at, 36-37.

Semmes, Admiral, blowing up of Richmond arsenal by, 211.

– Mrs., entertainment at house of, 128-130.

Seven Pines, guns captured by the Washington Artillery at, 79; battle of,

82-83, 84, 88.

Seventeenth Virginia, the, 48.

Shannon, Captain Samuel, 179.

Sharpsburg, 90.

Sheppard, William L., 180.

Sherburne, John P., 108.

Sherman, General, 192; return of, to Washington, 229.

Shooting Star, the, captured by the Chickamauga, 196.

“Short Comedies,” the, criticism of, 329.

Simonet, Monsieur, 274.

Sims, Canie, 250.

– Florence, 250.

– Dr. and Mrs. Marion, 250.

Skinner, Colonel Frederick, 179.

Slaughter, Rev. Dr. Philip, 8-9.

“Sleeping Beauty, The,” 307.

Sleepy Hollow, 99.

Slidell, Miss, 76.

Smith, Lieutenant Clark, 109.

– F. Hopkinson, as director of the Academy of Design, 314, 338.

– General Kirby, 225.

Smyrna, 364-5.

Society of Associated Artists, the, 308.

Society of Decorative Art, the, 308-9.

“Somnambula,” rehearsal of, at the Academy, 292-3.

Sorrel, General Moxley, 32, 47, 53, 162.

Soulי, Pierre, 160.

Source, La, 252.

Southern Illustrated News, the, 118.

Sparrow, Dr., 37.

“Spofford & Tileston,” private signal flag of, used by the Nashville in
running the blockade, 77.

Spotswood, the, Jefferson Davis at, during his trial, 267.

Spotswood Hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Davis at, 264.

Spottsylvania Court House, battle of, 182.

Springs, Berkeley, 14.

Stanard, Mr., 147.

– Mrs. Robert, 159-160.

St. Ann’s, marriage of Burton Harrison and Miss Cary at, 271-3.

Star of the West, the, C. S. S., 81.

“Star-Spangled Banner, The,” 219.

“Starvation Club, The,” 150-2.

Steinway Hall, entertainment of the Church Musical Association at, 287-8.

Stephens, Mr. Alexander H., 160.

Sterrett, Captain, 57-58.

Stevens, Frederic, 345.

Stewart, T. Scott, 299.

Stickney, Mr., 298.

St. John, General, 209.

St. Maur, Lord Edward, 131-2.

St. Michel, Chגteau, 365.

St. Nicholas, 340.

Stockbridge, Mass., 221.

Stockton, Frank, 338, 341.

Stoddard, Mrs. Elizabeth, 123.

– Henry, 123.

Stoneman, General, raid of, 137.

Storey, Mrs. Moorfield, 25.

“Story of the Civil War, The,” exctract quoted from, 93.

Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher, visit to Stockbridge, 221.

St. Paul’s Church, wedding of Hetty Cary and General Pegram, 201-3; funeral
services of General Pegram at, 203; sermon at, 207.

Page 385

St. Petersburg, visit of Mrs. Harrison to, 363.

Strong, George Templeton, President of the Church Musical Association, 287,

300.

Struve, M. de., 357.

Stuart, General J. E. B., 129, 174; death of, 175; description of, in the

“Crisis of the Confederacy,” 175-6.

Sullivan, Captain Clement, flag presented to General Van Dorn’s division
returned by, 65.

– Mrs. Algernon Sydney, 305.

Surטsnes, 254.

Surratt, Miss, 229.

– Mrs., 236.

Suydam, Lydig, “Portfolio” sold to, 315.

Suzanne, 282.

Swanson, Mrs., 79.

“Sweet Lavender,” the play, 321.

Sykes, Sir Tatton, 284.

Symington, Captain Stuart, 179.

T

Talleyrand, 41.

Tansill, Colonel, 198.

Taylor, Alfred, 345.

Tearle in “School for Scandal,” 320.

Teresa, 252.

Terrell, Mr., Minister to Turkey, 364.

Terry, Major, 53.

– Ellen, anecdotes of, 324-6.

Thalberg, 288.

Thיatre, Lyrique, 256.

– Franחais, 257.

Thomas, Theodore, 294.

– Miss Edith, 341.

Thompson, Mr. John R., 68, 118; visit of, to Carlyle, and diary, 120-4; editor
of New York Evening Post, 123, 172, 213.

– Mrs., 243.

– D. G., president of Nineteenth Century Club, 343, 344.

Thorburn, Colonel, 225.

Thorenc, Chגteau, home of Lord Rendel, 366.

Thorne, Mrs., 251.

Thursday Evening Club, the, meeting of, at Mrs. C. Vanderbilt’s, 333-4;
meeting of, 340-2; mock trial at home of Judge Howland, 342.

Thurston, Mrs., 12; entertainment at home of, 13.

Tilden, Samuel J., 301, 305.

Timrod, Harry, 118.

Todd, Provost-Marshal, 108, 109.

Tostיe in “La Belle Hיlטne,” 320.

Tourville, Count Henri de, dinner given by, at Delmonico’s, 318-9.

Towlston, 17, 23.

Trani, Countess de, 367-8.

– Count Louis de, 368.

Treasury Department, signing banknotes in, 190.

Trenholm, Frank, 262.

– Secretary, 179.

Trent, the, arrival of, at Southampton, 76.

Triplett, Mary, 158.

Tucker, Mr., 129.

– Randolph, Attorney-General of Virginia, 164.

– Lee, 167, 170-1; as “Jack Absolute,” 176.

Tuileries Chapel, the mid-day mass at, 254.

Tuileries Garden, the, 256; ball at the, 257-260.

Turner, Mr. Sumpter, 79.

– Major Thomas, 111.

– Miss Bierne, 158.

Tuscarora, the, U. S. S., eluded by the Nashville, 76-77.

Twiggs, General, 155.

Tybee, the, 299.

U

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 42.

Underwood, Judge, 265.

Union League Theatre, the, “Frog Opera” given at, 306.

Union Mills, the drive to, 105-6; return to, from Alexandria, 110.

Union Square Theatre, the, 320.

University Dining Club, the, 345.

V

Valentine, Mr. Edward, sculptor, 180.

Valori, Marquise de, 250.

Van Cott, Mr., 298.

Page 386

Vanderbilt, Mrs. Cornelius, 305, 329.

– Cornelius, 329.

Van Dorn, General Earl, flag sent by Mrs. Harrison to, 61; death of,
mentioned, 65.

Vaucluse, home of the Fairfaxes, stories of, 13-14; establishment at, 21, 22,

23; slaves freed at, 22; Fairfax portraits at, 23; tea parties to the clergy
and theological students at, 37, 44; silver buried at, 44-45, 154.

Vicksburg, 81.

Ville au Bois, La, 155, 245, 247.

Vincent, Leon John, 307.

Vineyard, home of Mr. Conway Robinson, 40.

Vinton, Rev. Dr. Francis, 302.

Virginia, the, 189.

“Virginia Mourning Her Dead,” 180.

Vizitelly, Frank, 132-3.

Von Borcke, Colonel Hיros, 129, 130 131, 135.

Von Inten, Mr., 290.

Voss, Emily, 83.

W

Waldstein, Professor, 360.

Walford, Mrs., 359.

Wallack, Lester, 320.

Wallack’s Theatre, 320.

Wall Street, “The Nursery of Paralysis,” 345.

Walter, Father, 234.

Walton, Major, 223.

Ward, Major, as “Nicholas Nickleby,” 174; as “Bob Acres,” 177.

– Miss, 307.

– Mrs. Humphry, 359.

Warner, Charles Dudley, 338.

Warwick, Colonel Bradfute, 161; death of, at Gaines’s Mill, 162.

Washington Artillery, the, march through Richmond, 78; at the battle of

Malvern Hill, 78-79.

Washington, Lawrence, 35.

– Captain William, 179-180.

– George, 248.

Watterson, Henry, 4.

Weitzel, Governor, 216.

Werner, Mr., 290.

West and Johnson, 213.

Western Metropolis, the, voyage on, 270.

Wheeler, Mrs. Candace, 308.

Whig, 4, 239.

Whig, Evening, the, 216.

White, President Andrew, 221.

Whitehurst’s, daguerreotypes taken at, 24.

Whiting, Major-General, report of, 197-8.

Whitney, William C., 158, 164, 295.

– General, 200.

Whitridge, Mrs. Frederick, 296.

Wickersham, Hon. George W., 343.

Wilderness, the, battle of, 182.

Wilkinson, Captain, 198.

Willis, Mr. and Mrs. N. P., visit of Mrs. Harrison’s mother to, 8.

Willoughby, Lady Cherubina de, 60.

Wilson, Miss, 24.

Wilson, Professor Woodrow, 219.

Wimbledon, 359.

Winder, Camp, Miss Cary as nurse at, 182-9; Mrs. Harrison’s mother at, 55.

Winder, General, 137.

Winthrop, Buchanan, 345.

Wise, Barton Haxall, 158.

– Brigadier-General Henry A., 158, 181.

– Mrs. Henry A., Jr., 158.

– Captain John Sargent, 179.

Wolfe, General, 35.

Wolseley, Colonel Garnet, estimate of Lee, 132.

“Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Homes,” 308.

Wood, Colonel John Taylor, 178, 222, 225.

Woolsey, Dr., 349.

World, the, 265.

Y

Yale College, 57.

Yellow Tavern, the battle of, 175; death of Stuart at, 182.

Young, General P. M. B., 178.

Z

Zborowski, Mr. Martin, 244.

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