Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 1843-1920. Recollections Grave and Gay

Recollections
Grave and Gay:
Electronic Edition

Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 1843-1920

Funding from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition
supported the electronic publication of this title.

Text scanned (OCR) by Jessica Mathewson
Title page scanned by Heather Bumbalough
Text encoded by Heather Bumbalough and Natalia Smith
First edition, 1998
ca. 1 MB
Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1998.
© This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.

Call number E487.H31 1911 (Davis Library, UNC-CH)

        The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-CH digitization project, Documenting the American South, or, The Southern Experience in 19th-century America.
        Any hyphens occurring in line breaks have been removed, and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line.
        All quotation marks and ampersand have been transcribed as entity references.
        All double right and left quotation marks are encoded as " and " respectively.
        All single right and left quotation marks are encoded as ' and ' respectively.
        Indentation in lines has not been preserved.
        Running titles have not been preserved.
        Spell-check and verification made against printed text using Author/Editor (SoftQuad) and Microsoft Word spell check programs.

Library of Congress Subject Headings, 19th edition, 1996

LC Subject Headings:

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.

RECOLLECTIONS
GRAVE AND GAY

MRS. BURTON HARRISON

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
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 début 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 châtelaine 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 repoussé 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 à 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 arm-chair 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 régime, 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 Gênes, 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 Sèvres, 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 stage-coach 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 head-quarters 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 head-quarters as "courier." His duties of message-carrying to the various head-quarters 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 head-quarters, 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 Belpré, 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 vivandière 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 head-quarters 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 head-quarters 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 Ponté, grandson of the librettist of "Don Giovanni," and himself a charming poet. Through Captain da Ponté, 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 Ponté told me that when the flag arrived at Van Dorn's head-quarters 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

head-quarters 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 Amélie 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 Crêve-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

Recollections Grave and Gay: Electronic Edition