[397]

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY

Copyright 1906 by Trotwood Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Entered as second class
matter Sept. 8, 1905, at the Postoffice at Nashville, Tenn., under the
Act of Congress of March 3, 1879.

The verdict of another century is sure to crystallize in the now growing belief that the two greatest military geniuses of the first century of the Republic were both named Jackson—Andrew and Stonewall.

The battles of all other commanders—the slow, ponderous, red-tape, unimaginative stands and retreats of Washington; the stubborn, mathematical defenses of the perfectly poised Lee; the ponderous hammerings of the stoical, machine-made Grant—all these were generals after a rule and a school. But the two Jacksons were a law unto themselves. They were comets among fixed stars, meteors in a still heaven. After the frightful holocausts of the Civil War, everything before it looks small.

But there are tragedies, even in an ant hill, and the life of the Republic came nearer going out in the wilderness of 1815 than at Bull Run, Shiloh or Gettysburg, fifty years later.

As the fighting savior of his country, posterity is ultimately bound to rank Jackson ahead of Washington; for Jackson finished the War of Independence, begun in 1776, on the eighth day of January, 1815.

And he finished it forever.

England never considered the matter closed at Yorktown, and when she marched through the North, burning Washington in wantonness and derision, knocking her generals about as so many dummies and their soldiers as so many tenpins, she was thinking of King’s Mountain and Yorktown.

Before Jackson’s day nothing was possible for the young Republic. She was gagged and bound, lying between England’s devil, on the north and west, and Spain’s deep, blue sea, on the south.

Since Jackson’s day everything has been possible for her; a century of progress and peace; the great Republic; the Monroe doctrine; the fighting prestige that could originate the cheek of a Venezuela bluff, and the remark the British admiral made to the German admiral at Manila.

The Civil War was a Johnstown flood, that made everything before it look like the breaking of a mill dam on Coon Creek; but the Civil War established nothing—literally nothing. Two peoples of the same blood and ideals had merely theorized themselves apart and into a war brought on by shadows bent on holding office and hence incapable of telling the truth. The two things they thought they were fighting to decide are just as strongly fixed to-day as they then were, to wit: that the town clerk is still the man to attend to the town pump, and that white is not black and never will be.

The only thing settled was whether there should be one town pump or forty-five, and whether it were better for the white to work the black under a life lease or a yearly one. The ideals, aims, purposes and principles of the Republic are the same to-day as they were before the big fight, and that it was a family scrap in which both sides would quickly double on any meddling intruder was demonstrated to the undoing of the arrogant Spaniard, who first trampled on the Republic’s ideals until she got to the fighting point and then foolishly brought on the war, believing, among other things, that the “Southern Confederacy would rise again” and help her in the fight.

And the Confederacy arose—at Manila and Santiago.

But so much has happened since Jackson and New Orleans, and so few really knew on what a narrow thread the life of all American ideals hung in those gloomy January days of 1815, and so long has it been crowded out for meaner things that it needs telling again, that the children may know it. For the grown people of to-day, born under lucky stars, made possible by the genius of Jackson’s work and the glory of his sacrifices, have been so busy picking up[399] dollars that they have neglected to look up, even at the stars. This story is to show them the star.

The gamest thing God ever gave to the human race was Andrew Jackson. I hesitate, in a brief story like this, to attempt to tell the hardships, sickness, sufferings, mutiny, bickerings, jealousies, insults, lies, treacheries, butcheries called battles, and starvations that he overcame to save his people and his country from Indians, Spain and England, and the Republic from that spirit of disintegration beginning with the Hartford Convention and ending with nullification. For be it known to all men and remembered, not in malice, but in forgiveness, that the first secession convention that ever assembled to dissolve this Union of States came together at Hartford, Conn., the very day Jackson was fighting to the death to save the Union at New Orleans.

And I say, not in malice, for there was in this, as there was in the other attempts of it in 1861, no question either of right or of wrong. Nation—Country—Republic—Empire—these are all merely abstract things bound up in the concrete idea of a home. As long as the home maximizes and the Nation minimizes, the latter is safe. But when it is reversed, when doubt and uncertainty and discontent come in, the abstract thing is lost in the struggle for the concrete. And every home idea has the right to fight for its existence.

But winning is another thing, and if they fail no man has any license to whisper traitor.

But for Jackson and the peace brought at Ghent by his destruction of the most formidable savage allies England ever had, and the menace of the struggling Republic’s existence; by his prompt unmasking of treacherous Spain at Pensacola and startling the hitherto unbeaten Briton by knocking his forts down about his ears at Mobile and sinking their ships in the bay, Gettysburg would doubtless have been fought a half century earlier, and in Massachusetts.

Let us see: The War of 1812 was forced on the States intentionally and with all the emphasis of a bully who meets a timid enemy on the highway and kicks and cuffs him for pure cussedness. New England was for standing the kicking so long as her ships and schooners might still traffic in negro slaves, rum, codfish and castor oil. The war tied[400] up her hulls to rotting at the wharves.

The war, until Jackson was discovered, had been a farce. From the Great Lakes to the South the bull-dozing, beef-eating, bloody-shirted Briton simply walked over the Yankee. “You’ll be setting the dogs on us next,” said a squad of Yankee soldiers, who staggered into a British camp to surrender and got cursed for coming.

Not one victory had they won. The British had burned the capital and run the President out of the back door. They had murdered citizens in the streets, and so empty was the treasury, and so degraded her credit that the Secretary of War had to pledge his private credit to get money enough to send Jackson to New Orleans. There was not money or credit enough left to buy wood to keep the cadets warm at West Point, and the young soldiers of the Republic’s future wars had to go into the woods and cut it and bring it in.

And all the time New England, the head and front of the Republic, sat sullen, secretly aiding the enemy and watching for a chance to secede. “Is there a Federalist, a patriot in America,” said the Boston Gazette, “who conceives it his duty to shed his blood for Bonaparte, for Madison and Jefferson, and that host of ruffians in Congress who have set their faces against us for years and spirited up the brutal part of the populace to destroy us? Not one. Shall we then be held in slavery and driven to desperate poverty by such a graceless faction? No more taxes for New England until the administration makes peace.” As if the cuffed and cudgeled administration was not doing its best, even to parting with the last raiment on the back of its self-respect!

Since the beginning of things there have been two kinds of great men—talkers and doers. The former are called orators when they talk so much and so well that their talk becomes natural.

Clay was a talker—Jackson a doer. There was a time when these two men ran side by side in the minds and memories of the living public. But that public is dead now, and they are far apart. Only the doer lives, as only the doer should live. Talk, since the beginning of time, has been the cheapest commodity of the human race. “And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent.... But I am slow of speech and of a slow tongue.... And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses, and he said. Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.... And he shall be to thee instead of a mouth.” That is the Biblical precedent for placing the orator over the doer.

Jackson was a Moses, Clay an Aaron. Clay, oily and brainy, and a man who “can speak well,” was sent over to make peace, with Bayard, and Gallatin, and Crawford and Adams—all Aarons and orators, and, praise God, all now dead and fast being forgotten. And they had been in Europe twelve long months, cooling their heels at the doors of diplomacy, or begging at the back door of its kitchen for such crumbs as the children might sweep off for the dogs. And after a while they got a few crumbs—England might be induced to quit her laying on of the lash if certain things were done to salve her wounded honor, including the fact that she could still impress American seaman wherever she could find them, and certain territory transferred to England, including what is now Wisconsin and Michigan and parts of Illinois and Indiana. For England of that day was the England of this day—a bully and a land-grabber.

And then the climax came—Bonaparte went under. Bonaparte, who had kept England so busy she hadn’t had time to whip us before, now in his fall unfettered the one thousand warships of Britain that had kept him out of the Channel and the Mediterranean and the army that later sent him to his Waterloo, and all these were free to fight the helpless under-dog across the waters.

And then the Aarons gave it up. One of them, Gallatin, wrote home from England: “The war is popular here, and that their national pride, inflated by their last unexpected success, cannot be satisfied without what they call the chastisement of America, cannot be doubted. They do not even suspect that we have any just cause of complaint, and consider[401] us altogether the aggressor and the allies of Bonaparte.”

Here is a sample of their contempt and billingsgate from the London Sun, one of England’s great papers, of September 3, 1814: “The American army of copper captains and Falstaff recruits defy the pen of satire to paint them worse than they are—worthless, lying, treacherous, slanderous, cowardly and vaporing heroes, with boastings in their loud tongues and terror in their quaking hearts. Were it not that the course of punishment they are undergoing is necessary to the ends of moral and religious justice, we declare before our country that we should feel ashamed of victory over such ignoble foes. The quarrel resembles one between a gentleman and a chimney sweeper—the former may beat the low scoundrel to his heart’s contentment, but there is no honor in the exploit, and he is sure to be covered with the soil and dirt of his ignominious antagonist. But necessity will sometimes compel us to descend from our station to chastise a vagabond, and endure the disgrace of a contest in order to repress, by wholesome correction, the presumptuous insolence and mischievous designs of the basest assailant.”

And the Times—the so-called thunderer—speaking of President Madison: “This fellow, notorious for lying, for imposture of all kind, for his barbarous warfare both in Canada and against the Creek Indians, for everything, in short, that can debase and degrade a government.”

When word came to Lord Castlereagh of the capture of Washington and the King of France said he doubted the truth of it, Castlereagh said: “It is true beyond all question, and I expect that by now most of the large seaport towns of America are laid in ashes, that we are in possession of New Orleans and have command of all the waters of the Mississippi and lakes. So that the Americans are now but little better than prisoners at large in their own country.”

And that is exactly what might have happened but for one backwoods Moses. And this Moses—it is ludicrous, even in its tragedy, to think what he was doing[402] when the event happened that first started him in his fame-crowned career.

A lank, fiery, swearing, drinking frontier lawyer, and general of coon-skin militia, sharp and sallow of face, blue of eye, peaked of head, his hair grizzled and tied with eel-skin, anointed with bear’s oil. Fighting chickens or duels, running horse races or hounds, buying land and negroes, standing stallions and for every office worth while, from Major General to Supreme Judge, and in all of it and every thing, getting there.

“Getting there” more nearly fitted him in every thing he ever attempted than any man of his day and generation. No American save Grant, Forrest, Stonewall Jackson and Roosevelt has ever come anywhere near his record of accomplishing things, and the latter has never yet had half a chance for showing what he might do in a pinch.

“Jim,” said one of Old Hickory’s negroes to another, the day after the old warrior died, “does yo’ think ole Marster has gone to heab’n?”

“Nigger,” said the other one, with becoming scorn, “does you think ole Marster has gone to de other place?”

“No, no! I don’t think dat—in course ole Marster couldn’t go to hell—he wus too good an’ kind a man fur dat, an’ too nice a gemman; but I jes’ can’t xackly see how he cu’d go to heab’n. De good Book say you mustn’t kill an’ you mustn’t cuss, an’ you know ole Marster wus right peart at both.”

“Nigger,” said the other, with emphasis, “if ole Marster tuk a noshun to go into heab’n jes’ tell me who gwine ter keep him out—jes tell me!”

Great men are teeth in the cog-wheels of things, and sooner or later the grooves they were made to fit will come to them.

The opportunity that knocked at Jackson’s door came from the arm of as gallant an Indian as ever made his word his bond—William Weatherford, the Red Eagle, war chief of the fighting Creeks.

Years before, a Scotch boy, Lachlan McGillivray, sixteen years old, ran away from home in a ship bound for Charleston, S. C. He reached there penniless, joined some Indian traders, and drove their pack horses into the Creek nation—for a jack knife! He traded this to the Indians for some deerskins and laid the foundation of a fortune that made him the greatest man in the Creek Nation and a power that three nations—Spain, England and America—courted till his death. He married Sehoy Marchand, a half-breed, sixteen-year-old Indian girl, with the sprightliness of her French father and the black eyes of her princess mother, Sehoy, a full-blooded Creek of the tribe of the Wind. Their son, Alexander McGillivray, though three-quarters white, became the most powerful and influential Indian of his day. He held his own in diplomacy and statesmanship with England, France and Spain. He was more than a match for the feeble government at Washington. His sister, Sehoy McGillivray, married a Georgian, Charles Weatherford, who lived with the Indians, owned land by counties, upon it the first race track in Alabama, owned negroes, thoroughbred horses, sheep and kine, ran the first cotton gin and held the first place of power among his people.

Weatherford, the Red Eagle, seven-eighths white, was his son, and Sehoy McGillivray was his mother. In his veins was Scotch, English, French and she whose family was of the Wind. He was an extraordinary man.

“His bearing,” said Pickett, who knew him well, “was gentlemanly and dignified. His eyes were large, dark, brilliant and flashing. He was one of nature’s noblemen—a man of strict honor and unsurpassed courage.”

Tecumseh, the greatest of all Indians, and a general in the English army, stirred up the Creeks as they were never aroused before. Acting for England with Spain, holding Florida as a secret and treacherous ally, he induced Weatherford to lead his Indians against Ft. Mims, in South Alabama, filled with men, women and children who had fled there for safety and were guarded by a lot of drunken, bragging American troops. The tragedy was inevitable, for both Spain and England were behind the Indians, England offering a reward for every American scalp—man’s or woman’s or child’s. And when the sun went down on the 30th[403] day of August, 1813, unless she lied to the Indians, as is likely, she paid for five hundred and thirty of them.

Money payment for the scalps of helpless women and children! Grand old England of Shakespeare, Drake and Wellington! Glorious vandals of Ft. Mims and Washington and New Orleans! When I think of her in those days I remember only Davy Crockett’s famous toast to her: “The British,” said old Davy, holding up a horn full of whiskey, “an’ may their ribs make the gridirons of hell!”

But it was not all a one-sided fight—they died game, even the little children—and the Indians buried six hundred of their warriors among the potato vines outside the stockade.

Weatherford and Tecumseh sowed the wind. In vain the Red Eagle pleaded for the lives of the women and children of the fort. For them he almost lost his own life and with clubs and guns drawn on him was forced to flee to save his life.

Not knowing this, the Americans marked him for death first and branded him “the butcher of Ft. Mims.”

Five days after this massacre, which changed the boundaries of the continent and threw Jackson into an arena calling for every quality of his grit and brain for years afterwards, Jackson, all unconscious of this opportunity of his life—for the sweat-covered courier did not reach Nashville with the news until September 19th—was engaged in a street fight to a finish with Thomas H. and Jesse Benton—two men who were afterwards his political champions.

It was a foolish, silly quarrel, more like that of boys than men. Jackson was drawn into it through the eternal fiber in him that forced him to make his friend’s quarrel his own. This friend was William Carroll, afterwards the gallant general who stood by him to a finish at New Orleans. Both Thomas H. and Jesse Benton were young lawyers living in Nashville. They were friends of Jackson. Thomas H. at the time was away in Philadelphia on business of great importance to Jackson. Jesse possessed much[404] of his brother’s fluency with none of his brains. He was eccentric and excitable. In a dispute he challenged Captain Carroll. It was all because some younger officers were jealous of Carroll and wanted to break his influence with Jackson.

In the duel with Carroll (which was harmless) he involved Jackson, and it ended in Jackson and the two Bentons fighting, in the streets of Nashville, a bloody duel, in which Jackson was shot, his arm and shoulder shattered, and the two Bentons found themselves, one in the bottom of a cellar, and the other’s life saved by the luckiest chance. Jackson almost bled to death. It was three weeks before he could leave his bed.

That was September 4, 1813. Even then a horseman was riding day and night through the wilderness of Alabama with news of the Indian butchery. Even then the Creeks, victorious and bloodthirsty, had collected an army greater than any which confronted for years and baffled Miles, Crook, Custer and Canby, and were marching toward the Tennessee and Georgia frontiers, with Weatherford, the Invincible, at their head. And Jackson, the man who was to save them and fight the most brilliant Indian war ever fought on American soil, maimed, half-dead and soaking mattresses with his blood.

The news made him forget his wounds and his feuds. Tennessee acted and placed her treasury and her sons at the service of the man who would lead them against the Indians. Jackson was in command, but Jackson was dead—so they said. But when a member of the committee of the Legislature came to his room and propped him up long enough to hear the committee’s report, and regrets that he was not able to take the field—“The devil in hell I can’t!” he shouted, as he got out of bed and began then and there his campaign against the Creeks. His proclamation followed. Propped up in bed, he wrote: “The horrid butcheries perpetrated on our defenseless fellow-citizens near Ft. Stoddard cannot fail to excite in every bosom a spirit of revenge.... It surely never would be said that the brave Tennesseeans wanted other inducements than patriotism and humanity to rush to the aid of our bleeding neighbors and friends and relatives.”

October 4 was the day he designated for the troops to meet at Fayetteville, Tenn., and on October 4 Jackson was there.

A book might be written on Jackson’s Creek war. The Duke of Wellington said that if Jackson had done nothing else this war would have ranked him among the greatest generals.

I cannot accept this as meant literally. But what a record of hardships, grit, perseverance, gameness, generalship, resourcefulness, agony of overcoming it is! Just one month from the day of his street duel in Nashville he rendezvoused his troops at Fayetteville. He could not mount his horse without help. He could not bear for a coat collar to touch his shattered shoulder. The least unguarded movement, and a thrill of agony went through his bloodless frame.

We all remember the lives and years and treasure it took to subdue even the Sioux of the Northwest. Ask Crook and Miles and also poor Custer—soldiers all, equipped to a king’s taste and backed by the best army of Indian fighters the world ever saw—except one, and that one the smaller army that Jackson had to subdue in a twelve months the most powerful federation of the most intelligent Indians living.

Jackson marched into their territory October, 1813. By April, 1814, they were killed or conquered, and those who remained, even their greatest chief, William Weatherford, were his friends and allies.

[405]

The infallible proof of a great general is his ability to turn his conquered foes into friends. This was Alexander’s, Caesar’s, Jackson’s, and Grant’s decoration. It was lacking in William the Conqueror, in Wellington, Sherman and Sheridan. From Nashville to Fayetteville is eighty miles along the old military road, now as prosperous a farming country as ever an army tramped across. At one o’clock, October 11, a courier dashed into camp from John Coffee, guarding the frontier at the Tennessee river, crying that the Creeks were coming. He started back in five minutes, saying that Jackson was[406] coming instantly. Instantly was always the better part of his religion. He acted instantly at New Orleans, and it was all that saved him. And no general, by the record, who ever lived before or since, save perhaps Stonewall Jackson, would have done it. Incredulous as it seems, by eight o’clock that same night these 2,500 Tennesseeans, with their sick and wounded general, had marched, footing it, thirty-two miles to Huntsville. Thirty-two miles in less than seven hours!

They crossed the river at Ditto’s Landing, and then began that remarkable war of the civilized against the barbarian, equaled only when Caesar marched into the woods of Germany and fought their great Teutonic hordes from daylight till death.

And the Nervit were not braver than the Creeks under Weatherford, the Red Eagle. Canby was an Indian fighter, tried and resourceful. He fought through the Mexican War, on the plains with Albert Sidney Johnston, through the Civil War, capturing Mobile, and proved to be a hard-fighting and an iron soldier. But the Modocs butchered him.

Custer—his fate is yet fresh in the minds of the living. In the war between whites he was the equal of Wheeler. With as many men and far better equipped than Jackson ever dreamed that men could be, he attacked a mere handful of Indians compared to the great wilderness of them. Jackson marched into and conquered, and yet they killed Custer, and every man of his brave but unthinking force. “Twenty-five hundred men and thirteen hundred horses on the bluffs of the Tennessee,” writes Parton, “on the borders of the civilization, about to plunge into pathless woods and march, no one knew how far, into the fastnesses and secret retreats of a savage enemy! Such a body will consume ten wagon loads of provisions every day. For a week’s subsistence they require a thousand bushels of grain, twenty tons of flesh, a thousand gallons of whisky, and many hundredweight of miscellaneous stores.” Yet Jackson fed them, with little aid from any outside source, often eating nothing but parched acorns himself. His pathetic letters begging, commanding, beseeching the governors of Tennessee and Georgia for food for his troops are written with an ink of fire. “There is an enemy I dread more than I do the hostile Creeks,” he wrote, “and whose power, I am fearful I shall first be made to feel. I mean that meager monster, famine. I shall leave this encampment in the morning direct for Ten Islands, and hence with as little delay as possible to the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, and yet I have not on hand two days’ supply of breadstuffs.”

Hunger and mutiny—what would Custer and Crook and Canby and Miles have done had these been added to the Indians? He ate acorns, and with a single rifle barring the path of his starved and mutining troops, he literally bluffed and drove them on. Seeing it all clearly now, his victory over the Indians was the lesser one.

Fighting Indians, fighting mutiny, fighting famine, fighting the terrible enervating, blood-sucking disease that preyed on his very vitals—this was the Andrew Jackson in the pitiless forests of that pitiless age, with one arm in a sling, sallow, bloodless and emaciated, resting his rifle across his horse’s neck in front of the column of starved and mutinous troops homeward bound and with eyes blazing, his grizzled hair bristling with fury, exclaiming: “By the Eternal, I will blow the first damned villain into eternity that advances another step! I will hold this fort if only two men will stay with me!”

Here are two pictures of him, then that go into you and stay—one of his innate tenderness, the other his undying grit. At the battle of Tallushatchee an Indian mother was found dead with a half-starved babe at her breast. “Let it die,” said the other squaws; “all its people are dead. It is the law of our race.” Jackson had it taken to his own tent and found a little brown sugar to make it a tea. He had it cared for, took it home, adopted it, raised and educated it. It knew no father or mother save the conquering Jackson and the good Aunt Rachel.

Imagine Caesar coming out of Gaul with a fair-haired white child in his tent! This man was greater than Caesar, ay, than ten Caesars.

[407]

The other was his grit. Unable to eat what little he had, unable to sleep, there were times even when he could not sit his horse for the griping pains of an outraged stomach. Only one thing gave him relief, and how he discovered it no one ever knew. Down from his horse he would slide, have a young sapling bent down, and hang over it, head down, till he deadened the terrible pain. Imagine Alexander’s Greeks marching across Asia and beholding their god hanging over a young tree, head down, racked with the pain of a woman.

The finish came at Tohopeka (the Horse Shoe) on the banks of the sweet-running Tallapoosa, as beautiful to-day as then. Never had Indians fortified before—breastworks invulnerable, with portholes. Behind that, logs and brushwood, from behind which Indians love to fight, and all unseen. And the Creek Nation died there almost to a man and a woman.

The scene of the Red Eagle’s surrender is worthy a great artist. In the forests of Alabama. Sentinels—soldiers. The marquee of General Jackson. Big Warrior, a scalawag Creek, sunning himself by the door. Riding through the forest on the same gray, half-thoroughbred horse that leaped the bluff with him at the Holy Ground the Red Eagle comes to give himself up, that his starving people might live. Tell me not this was martyrdom and patriotism of the highest, for well did he know what they thought of him, “the butcher of Ft. Mims,” and easily could he have escaped and gone in to the British in Florida, as many of his comrades had done.

But if he had gone who would protect and plead for the starving women and children? Besides, he had found out the British and the Spaniards, and he hated their ways. He knew that his life alone would atone for it all, and so he rode up to surrender and be shot for his people. A deer crosses his path. He kills it with his rifle and flings it over the pommel of the saddle. Some sentinels stop him. One points out the General’s tent, but none suspects it is he, else he had not lived to reach the door.

[408]

Astonished, dumbfounded, Big Warrior rubs his eyes and looks. Is he asleep? Can it be—can it be—

“Ha, Bill Weatherford! Have we got you at last?”

Weatherford looked at him. “You traitor, speak not to me, or I will put a ball through your heart.”

General Jackson heard, and, furious, stalked out with Hawkins at his heels. “How dare you, sir, ride up to my tent, having murdered the women and children of Ft. Mims?”

Soldiers near by sprang up with bitter oaths. Not one but would have given an arm for the honor of killing him. A dozen guns leap up in the wild shout and babble for precedence, but Weatherford sits and calmly looks into their muzzles, while Jackson waves his hand and says: “Silence, and let him speak!”

“I am not afraid of you, General Jackson—I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to ask for myself. Kill me if you wish. I come to plead for the women and children starving in the woods. Their fields are destroyed, their homes gone, their cribs empty. They have nothing to eat. Send out your men and bring them in. I did all I could to stop the massacre at Ft. Mims. I am done fighting. My warriors all are killed. Kill me now, if you wish, but save the remnant of our noble race.”

“Kill him! Kill him!” shouted the soldiers, as their guns came up again. But as he spoke Jackson had seen and understood. Over the head of the chief he saw, over the clamoring, cursing troops who begged for his blood, over the past, over Ft. Mims, over all—to Pensacola—to the British sheltered there, waiting to march into his land to plunder and burn; to the Spanish, two-faced and deceitful, urging them on.

Instantly he acted. Instantly his great heart, as true for the truth as a hound for the trail, saw the nobility of the savage towering above the littleness and ignominy of the greater race. And there flashed in his broader vision Pensacola and New Orleans. He turned to his troops: “Who’d kill so brave a man as this would rob the dead.”

Weatherford then threw his game at his feet. “Take it, my General, for Weatherford is starving.”

Jackson seized his hand: “No, by God, you come in and eat with me.”

(The next paper will be “The Road to New Orleans.”)

He was an Irishman by birth, and a blacksmith by trade, but gave up his bellows and tongs to “follow the feather” of his gallant countryman, Gen. Pat Cleburne, in the Confederate Army, and became a gunner in a battery. In many of his characteristics Mike was strikingly like his great captain. Though possessed of a rich vein of Irish wit and humor he did not have that volatile, bubbling over-flow of spirits so natural to his people; on the contrary, he was quiet and retiring in his disposition, even to apparent timidity. His only form of dissipation was tobacco. I well remember his dirty little cob pipe, black with age and tobacco, with a stem not three inches long, of the same color, and from the same causes.

Every old soldier who saw much active service in the field, in thinking of the close places he has passed through, will recall vividly the sunburnt face and form of some comrade, friend or acquaintance, conspicuous for his courage, brave where all were brave, but he the bravest of them all. In this light dear old lion-hearted[409] Mike always appears to me, when memory harks back to the stirring scenes of forty odd years ago. With the courage of a game-cock, the modesty of a woman, and a sunny temperament, he was indeed a lovable companion, and when by your side in action, made you feel as if you had two right arms and a double pair of eyes. It is not, however, to speak of his courage that I write, but of some ludicrous incidents that happened to him after he “jined the cavalry.”

Mike was torn nearly in two by a canister shot the second day at Shiloh, while his battery was engaged with one of the enemy’s, and as soon as he was able to stand the journey, his surgeon sent him to his home in Helena, Ark., to die, as he thought, but which Mike, with an Irishman’s perversity, refused to do, and which he explained to me afterwards, in a half apologetic tone for not doing, that the shot really didn’t damage his “in’ards.” It, however, incapacitated him for service in the infantry, and as the Federal forces by that time had the river as far down as Vicksburg, he could not well get back to his old battery, so he reluctantly joined the cavalry. I say reluctantly, because while he knew every bone and nerve in a horse’s foot, and was perfectly at home when he had that article between his knees tacking on a shoe, put him on a horse’s back and he was as helpless as a new born babe. I doubt if he was ever on a horse half a dozen times in his life, until he joined Capt. Rufe Anderson’s company of scouts of Colonel Dobbins’ regiment, Walker’s Brigade of Arkansas Cavalry, of which I was also a member at that time. Seeing him one day, shortly after he had joined, hesitate on the bank of a little stream, as if debating with himself which would be wiser, to attempt to ride across or to get down and wade and lead his horse, I called out to him: “Grip him with your knees, Mike, and your back will keep dry.”

“Grip him with me knase, is it?” he replied. “Then, be jimminy, I’ll git down and wade, for it’s myself that’s as bow-legged as a barrel hoop, and it’s me grub, not me back, I’m afther kaping thry.”

Several months had passed since Mike had joined us and he had improved in his horsemanship to such an extent that he would even venture sometimes, when very much aggravated, to punish the “brute of a baste” he was riding with the spur, instead of dismounting and larruping the horse with a sprout, as he did at first. But notwithstanding his poor skill as a rider, Mike’s love of anything that might lead up to a brush with “our friends, the enemy,” was so strong he was always ready and anxious to go on our scouting expeditions.

Anderson, the captain of our company, was a superb rider. Having spent many years of his life on the Texas frontier, he could perform all the tricks in the saddle so common to the cowboys of the present day, but rarely ever seen then, such as scooping down and picking up his glove, hat, or pistol from the ground, with his horse at full speed. The frequent encounters his company had with the cavalry of the enemy made him pretty well known and much sought after by them, and through the citizens they had obtained, not only a good description of him, but also a thorough knowledge of his dexterity as a rider.

On one occasion our scouts reported a[410] foraging train of the enemy coming out from Helena escorted by a squadron of cavalry. Weatherly, our first lieutenant, was in command of our troop that day, Anderson being absent, and as the old man was of a naturally quarrelsome disposition and never lost an opportunity to pick a fuss or make a fight, either in or out of the army, we were soon in the saddle and on our way to strike the escort of the foragers. We were considerably outnumbered, but Weatherly thought that if he would dismount part of his men, place them in ambush, and when they opened fire on the blue-coats, charge with his mounted men on their rear, the advantage of the surprise would about even the thing up. So part of us were dismounted, Mike and I of the number, and placed in a dense thicket not more than twenty paces from the road. The Federal column soon rode in, and at the word “Fire” the thicket blazed, and at the same time Weatherly charged, as he thought, on their rear with his mounted men. A number of men and horses went down under our fire and the head of the Federal column was thrown into confusion, but only for a moment, for we had struck the Fifth Kansas, commanded by Maj. Sam Walker, as good a body of cavalry and as brave an officer as there was in either army. At command they wheeled and formed, fronting the thicket, and charged in the face of our second volley. At the same time a yell, distinctly “Yankee,” and a heavy discharge of carbines farther down the road to our right, told us as plainly as if we had seen it, that Weatherly had wedged himself in between the advance guard and main column of the enemy. At this unexpected turn of affairs, with nothing but our six-shooters to hold back such odds (we did not have time to reload our guns), it did not take long to determine what to do. “Fall back to your horses,” was the order, and we fell.

Mike and I were together. Partly on account of his old wound, but mostly, I think, on account of his contentious disposition under such circumstances, he was the poorest runner I ever saw—at least it impressed me so at the time—and when we reached our horse-holder he was mounted, the others all gone, and throwing the reins to us he followed in hot haste. I was in my saddle instantly; Mike was not so fortunate. His horse, a long, lank old bay, as thin as a fence rail, excited by the shooting, shouting, and running, was plunging viciously around in the brush dragging Mike, who was pawing the air with first one foot and then the other in fruitless efforts to catch the stirrup, at the same time keeping up a continuous string of comments upon the situation generally, interspersed with bits of advice to me and curses at his horse, such as: “Give’m a taste of your shooting, boy,” “Whoa, you d—d old brute of a baste,” “Look at the blue divils how they swarm,” “What a d—d fool old Weatherly was,” “Struck’m in the middle,” “Divil take the cavalry service,” “Whoa, you—”

In the meantime the Federals, finding nothing in front of them, were coming on as fast as the nature of the ground would admit, firing at random, for the bushes were so thick they could not see ten feet ahead of them.

Although expecting to show a clean pair of heels to the enemy, I had instinctively drawn a fresh pistol from my holster when I mounted, and according to Mike’s advice was using it to the best advantage I could, at the same time anxiously watching his circus performance with the old bay, and inwardly praying that it would come to a speedy close, or both of us would be either killed or captured, in a half minute more. I couldn’t leave him under the circumstances, for he had more than once stood between me and “the other shore,” in places equally as close, and to desert him now, would look like rank ingratitude and cowardice.

“Turn him loose, Mike, and jump up behind me, it’s our last chance,” I yelled, and at that instant the front line of the enemy burst through the thicket into the open woods within thirty steps of us. Bang! bang! bang! went the carbines. “Halt! halt! surrender! surrender!” they called out. I wheeled, to pick up Mike, if possible, and take my chances running, just in time to see his horse lunge forward and he lying like a sack of meal crosswise in the saddle, with one hand[411] clutching the mane about midway his horse’s neck. My first impression was that he had been shot, and I was relieved to see him wiggle his leg over the blanket strapped behind his saddle, and straighten up. Our horses were going at racing speed and Mike was doing some wonderful riding. He was bouncing about like a ball, neither foot in a stirrup, and he showed no partiality for any particular place to sit. Every time his old horse would make a jump, Mike would come down on him in a different place—behind the cantle, in the saddle, over the pommel on his neck, then back again, up one side and down the other—he literally rode the old bay from his ears to his tail. A fallen tree was in front of us, both horses took the leap at the same time, and Mike disappeared on the far side of his old “brute of a baste”—gone this time, sure, I thought, but the next instant, bare-headed he bounced back on top again. Our pursuers, not liking to follow us too far in the woods, fired a parting volley of lead and curses at us and pulled up. A few hundred yards farther on we run into our scattered squad, that had halted and reformed.

An hour later, Weatherly having gotten the company together, we were pegging away at the rear guard of the enemy as they leisurely fell back into Helena, having sent their well-loaded wagons on in front. I stopped a moment to get a drink of water at a farm house the enemy had just left. The old man had a son in our company, and was anxious to hear from him, and learn something of the skirmish.

“I tell you they came very near getting Captain Anderson,” he said, after learning that his boy was all right.

“How’s that?” I asked, “Captain Anderson wasn’t in the skirmish at all.”

“Oh, yes he was,” he replied. “That Yankee captain that just left here told me he rode right up on Anderson. Knew it was him from his riding; never saw such devilish fine riding in all his life; said Anderson just played along in front of him, cutting up all kinds of antics on his horse, and he could have caught him had he not been afraid Anderson was just trying to decoy him into another ambush.”

I knew at once that Mike’s remarkable performance had been taken for Anderson’s skill. The story was too good to keep, and no one enjoyed it more than Captain Anderson. When the boys run it on Mike, however, he replied:

“It’s all right, me lads, but there’s no danger of any of you blackguards ever being misthaken for your betthers.”

It was not long after the above episode before Mike had another opportunity, of which he took advantage, to masquerade as his captain on horseback. One morning a scout came in and reported a strong body of Federal cavalry coming out from Helena, on what was known as the “middle road” to Little Rock, on a scouting expedition; which for the benefit of the younger generation I will say simply meant they were hunting for a fight. I remember very distinctly I thought those Western fellows were exceedingly quarrelsome, and as Mike said, “a meddlesome set of divils,” in those days, and uncommonly handy with a sabre or six-shooter; but I have met many of them since then, and together we have imbibed the juices of the corn and rye, and even of the grape, while talking over old times, and I have found it simply astonishing how erroneous early impressions sometimes are.

There were two or three public roads that branched off from this “middle road” at different points between our camp and where the Federal column was last seen, and after sending couriers to draw in all of our pickets and assemble the regiment for action, the Colonel ordered me to take four or five men, go down and observe the enemy, get their strength, report from time to time which road they were advancing on, so that he could place his command and strike them on ground of his own choosing. Mike went with me; he always did when there were any prospects of fun or a fight, and while the probabilities were rather slim for either in this case, for I was instructed to keep myself concealed and after getting the desired information rejoin the regiment as quickly as possible, Mike took the chances of something turning up that would give[412] him an opportunity to “bust a cap at the meddlesome divils,” and asked to be one of the men to accompany me.

I was perfectly familiar with the country, and taking the little squad started on an air line through the forest for the point where the first road branched off, which I hoped to reach before the Federals came up, so that I could take a position suitable for my purpose and send a man back with the required information without being seen by them.

A half-hour’s rapid riding through the timber brought us close to the place where the roads forked and where I intended to take my first look at the blue-coats. The road here ran through thick woods. I knew I was close to it, but the undergrowth, through which we were riding, was so dense I could not see it. I also knew that if the enemy had not already passed this point, allowing them ordinary marching time, they could not be far off. Placing the men in line, some ten or fifteen steps apart, so they would be less likely to attract attention, we rode slowly and cautiously forward, feeling for the road. I took the place of lookout, and the men were to stop or move forward according to the motion of my hand. Mike was next to me on my right, some ten or fifteen steps away, and while I watched for the enemy, he was to watch me, and when I signaled him, he was to signal the next man, he the next, etc.

We had gone perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards in this way, when I heard that dull, rumbling sound familiar to every old cavalryman, that told me we were in close vicinity of a large body of moving horses. Peering through the bushes in the direction of the sound, and without turning my head towards my men, I motioned them to stop. The rumbling noise grew louder and nearer. For a few seconds my little party were perfectly quiet, then Mike’s horse grew restless and began to move about. Watching intently in the direction of the approaching noise and without looking around, I again motioned Mike to keep quiet, but it did no good. I could hear him swearing vigorously in a low tone at the old “baste of a brute,” but it only seemed to make the horse worse; he not only continued to twist and turn about, but began to sneeze and stamp the ground. At that instant I saw the advance guard of the Federal column file around a bend in the road not two hundred yards below us. I could tell from the direction they were coming, that we were much nearer the road than I had supposed, and that they would pass dangerously close to where we were standing; at the same time Mike’s horse began to lunge around, snorting, sneezing, kicking and keeping up as much racket in the brush as a train of army wagons, while Mike himself was swearing by note and loud enough to be heard above it all.

“Here they come, Mike! In the devil’s name keep quiet or they’ll bag every mother’s son of us,” I said as I turned my face toward him to see what was the matter. A glance explained it all. The old horse, in twisting about, had knocked over a rotten stump and uncovered a yellow jackets’ nest, that held a half bushel, it looked to me, of the maddest jackets I had ever seen. They had sampled the legs of Mike’s horse several times, but when they began to swarm up and pop it to him on his thighs and sides, the old fellow could stand it no longer and bolted straight forward through the brush, kicking, snorting, squealing like a mustang, and inside of fifty yards of where we were standing jumped into the open road.

Mike and his steed were about the busiest pair just then I ever saw; the old horse was kicking, squealing, stamping, plunging and biting in his frantic efforts to get rid of his tormentors, while Mike was giving his whole time, and undivided attention, to swearing and sticking on. He made no effort to guide him, but by the luckiest chance on earth the horse turned up the road, instead of down towards the enemy.

It was evidently a startling apparition that thus suddenly appeared in the road in front of the Federal cavalry, for they came abruptly to a halt, and for a moment seemed undecided as to what it was, or what to do, for the old horse had his busiest end towards them and they could see, what must have appeared to them, a dozen or more horses’ tails flirting up and down, around and around[413] in the air (for the old brute was swinging it vigorously and with lightning rapidity), and a countless number of heels and legs flying out of this cloud of horse hair in all directions. At the same time a shapeless bundle of something gray, was bouncing about on top, for Mike in his gymnastic exercise in holding on assumed many inconceivable attitudes, all of which were enveloped in a thin yellow cloud that certainly was not dust, and out of which came curses, groans, squeals, and snorts. The old horse did everything but lie down to rid himself of the torture. Finally he made up his mind to run, and such running—a streak of lightning would have been distanced at the rate he went. He looked as if he was literally flying and would only touch the earth at intervals long enough to sling his heels out in vicious kicks, first on one side and then the other. At this part of the performance Mike would bounce up a frightful distance, but always managed to come down on the neck, back, or side of his horse. I never in my life saw such running, and can truthfully say no circus ever gave a greater variety of styles in riding.

As soon as the horse stretched out into a run, and the enemy could see what it was in front of them, they unslung their carbines, fired a volley at Mike and a half dozen or them darted out at full speed after him. As they passed I heard one fellow call out:

“Look at the damned rebel how he rides, will you?” And a sergeant mounted on a big gray horse shouted:

“It’s Anderson himself, boys, come on!” and he drove the spurs in the sides of his horse.

They were too intent on catching, as they thought, the noted captain and expert rider in front of them, to notice us in the brush, but being quite familiar with their methods, I was satisfied they would at once throw out flankers to prevent an ambush, so I moved back promptly to a safe position, and after following and watching them for several miles, and getting all the information desired, finally locating them on the proper road, all of which I reported to the colonel from time to time by sending a man back, I rejoined the command myself just in time to take a part in the wind-up of a sharp little fight that was claimed a draw by both sides. We held the ground, but the enemy was drawing off in good order down the road they had advanced on. We lost some men and had killed and captured some of theirs. Amongst the latter I recognized the sergeant, on the big gray horse, who had been so intent that morning on capturing Mike, thinking it was Anderson. He was battered up a little, had caught a pistol ball in his bridle-arm and evidently from the cut on his head had been knocked off of his big gray in the skirmish by some of our fellows.

Mike and I were standing by while his wounds were being dressed by our surgeon. He happened to be a countryman of Mike’s, and with that never failing, but indescribable bond of sympathy that the gallant sons of the Emerald Isle always have for each other, it matters not under what sky or flag they meet, they were soon engaged in an animated, but amicable discussion as to the merits of the two respective armies. With the truthfulness of a saint depicted on his countenance, Mike made the most startling and exaggerated statement concerning the strength and resources of our troops, and turning toward Captain Anderson, who had just walked up, he said: “I’ll l’ave it to Cap’n Anderson if I’m not right.”

At the mention of Anderson’s name and rank, the prisoner turned quickly and with much curiosity expressed in his face, critically eyed, over and over, the light but sinewy figure of the noted captain and skillful rider. Anderson noticed that he was being closely scrutinized, but without knowing any special cause therefor, he nodded pleasantly at the captive trooper and remarked: “That was a pretty sharp rap some of our fellows gave you over your head, sergeant.”

“Right ye are, Cap’n,” he replied, “but it’s meself that would be afther takin’ tin times as many, only to have caught ye this mornin’, whin we chased ye down the road.”

I had not yet mentioned to the captain any of the minor details of my[414] morning’s work, so he knew nothing of Mike’s adventure with the hornets, for that worthy gentleman, when he joined the command at the end of his wild ride, had simply reported that we had met the Yankees unexpectedly at a bend in the road and they had chased him some distance, but that I, with the rest of the men, was yet in the brush and would get all of the information wanted. The other men that I sent in afterwards, had reported direct to the colonel and were at once sent off by him to hurry up different detachments consequently, Mike’s last feat in horsemanship had not yet gained circulation.

Anderson looked at the prisoner when he made the above statement, and shook his head doubtfully. Mike looked at me and shook his head slyly.

“You are mistaken, my man,” said Anderson. “I admit I have had to show you my heels occasionally, but it was not on the cards to-day. That don’t look like it, does it?” he added, as he pointed down the road to the cloud of dust that marked the retreat of our late adversaries.

The sergeant was not to be denied, however, for he had seen him, as he thought, with his own eyes and had shot at him; lowering his voice to a half whisper he said:

“Faith, Cap’n, and it’s no shame to ye that ye run, for didn’t we have the howl command at our back? But it’s a beautiful rider ye are to be sure; it’s yourself that can tache the best one that iver sthradled a horse, and Jim Sullivan would give a month’s pay to see ye do it again and take a dozen more knocks like this on his head besides.”

Anderson turned to me with a look of bewilderment on his face and asked: “What is the fellow talking about? What does he mean?”

“Ask Mike,” was all I could say, for I was convulsed with suppressed laughter. With a sly wink at Anderson and a droll look on his dusty, smoke-begrimed face, Mike replied:

“To be sure, Cap’n, it was meself that did the thrick on horseback this mornin’ the fellow is sp’aking of, jist for me own devarsion, and to show the bloody divils how ye have taught your men to ride as well as fight.” And he gave another confidential and assuring wink at Anderson.

“Why, of course—certainly, Mike—certainly,” said Anderson, anxious to confirm any statement Mike would make, but not yet certain of his ground.

“It’s the blissid truth I’m afther tilling ye, Jim Sullivan, if that’s yer name,” continued Mike, turning to the sergeant, with a face as serious as a Quaker’s prayer meeting, “whin I say I’m the poorest rider in the company, bad luck to the old horse for the same, but as ye had the least bit of a taste this mornin’ of what I can do in the saddle, whin I’m a mind to, jist scratch yer head and think what the cap’n and the rest of the boys can do whin they thry.”

The sergeant looked with open-eyed astonishment from Anderson to Mike, then grasping the latter’s hand with a proud look on his face he said:

“It’s ould Ireland, me lad, that can bate the world. Ye may be a poor rider in your company, but ye can make the best man in the ould Fifth (his regiment) ashamed of himself in the saddle, and by the same token some of’m were rocked, whin babies, in horse troughs for cradles.”

The captain and myself left Mike and his countryman discussing horses and how to ride them, but we were satisfied Mike would change the subject as soon as possible, for he knew no more about either than a Digger Indian does of the Greek alphabet.

It was not long after this before Mike had his “innings” on our friends in blue, although he did not come out as scathless as in the two scrapes above mentioned.

Our pickets reported a body of Federal cavalry advancing towards LaGrange from Helena, on the St. Francis road. Our regiment was badly scattered, having to picket some twelve or fifteen miles of country, but at the sounds of “boots and saddle” a hundred and forty or fifty men “fell in,” and with the colonel at our head we went trotting through LaGrange to meet the enemy.

Some two or three miles below the little village, the road ran through one of those large cotton plantations common in that section, with a high rail fence[415] on either side. In the woods just at the end of this lane there was a thick, heavy growth of young paw-paws. Dismounting Weatherly, who had in the meantime been promoted to a captaincy, and thirty-five or forty of his men, were placed in ambush along the road with instructions to open fire on the enemy as soon as they came up. The colonel took the rest of the command, skirted the plantation and came to the lane a half mile further down and in their rear. We had scarcely reached this position and formed in the timber before Weatherly’s guns opened. We swung by fours out into the lane and with a yell went at them under full speed, Colonel Dobbins and Captain Anderson (the latter’s company being in front), leading the charge on the right and left of the column. The road was as open and level as a billiard table, every man was driving the steel in his horse, and we were going at racing speed. The rear companies of the Federal squadron promptly wheeled to meet us and poured a steady fire from their carbines on us as we came up. I happened to be one of the first fours and was within a few feet of the colonel, when I saw him glance over his shoulder, slacken his speed somewhat, throw up his hand and call to Captain Anderson: “Let the men close up!” At the rate we had been coming, we were necessarily badly strung out, and the Federals were standing solid across the entire road, not more than seventy-five yards from us.

I pulled up my horse slightly and had half turned my head to look back, when, like a red streak, a trooper dashed by me. There was no mistaking the rider. The reins were flying loose, the old horse’s blood was up, and so was Mike’s. He couldn’t have stopped him if he would and he wouldn’t if he could, for “Charge” to Mike meant “go in” whether there was one man or a thousand at his back. He was unslinging his gun for action as he passed (a double-barrel shotgun loaded with buck and ball, and, by the way, the best weapon cavalry could be armed with in those days for close work). I had only time to notice this before our rear had closed up and the colonel again gave the order to charge. The delay was only the fractional part of a second, but Mike was then flying fifty yards in front of us. I saw two puffs of smoke fly over his shoulder and he disappeared in the cloud. The next instant we were “mixing with ’em.” The action was short, sharp and fierce, the Federals using the sabre, we six-shooters, and was too hot to last long. Their rear gave way, we went through, joined Weatherly, and never gave them time to reform until they were driven inside of their lines.

I was hurrying back to the place where I had last seen Mike, when I came up on our surgeon gouging into a poor fellow after a ball and inquired if he had found Mike.

“Yes.”

“Dead?”

“No, but wounded and on ahead in an ambulance.”

I didn’t have an opportunity to see him until some time after midnight. I found him stretched out on some straw, with others, in a barn that had been converted into a hospital. His head was swathed in bandages and looked as big as a half bushel. His face was so swollen he could not see, and the poor fellow was delirious.

From the surgeon I learned that Mike had marched a couple of prisoners up to him, saying: “Take charge of ’em, Doc,” when he keeled over at his feet with an empty six-shooter in his hand. An examination showed that his head had been terribly beaten; the cuts were to the skull in five different places.

I afterwards learned from Mike, as soon as he was able to crawl out and suck his cob pipe, that after emptying both barrels of his gun, he did not have time to draw his pistol before he was wedged in the Federal column, and clubbing his gun, he was “knocking the spalpeens” right and left, when some “dirty blackguard” struck him over the head, knocking him from his horse. In falling he was caught between the horses of a couple of Federal troopers, his arms pinned to his sides as the horses were crowded together in the lane, and the last thing he remembered they were beating a tattoo on his head. When he recovered consciousness he was lying in the timber and two Federal soldiers were[416] standing close by, their command gone and they undecided whether to try and escape or surrender. Mike decided the question for them. Struggling to his feet and taking a pistol from the ground, having lost his own, doubtless in his tumble, he promptly ordered them to throw up their hands, which they did, and were marched back as above stated. Neither Mike nor his prisoners knew at the time that the pistol he pointed at them was empty.

Mike was a great favorite with the colonel, who, like the rest of us, would occasionally joke him about his riding. Shortly after the incident just mentioned Mike was out sunning himself. The colonel passed by and began to rig him about letting his horse run away in the charge, and carry him into the Yankee lines. “Run away, is it,” said Mike. “Och, colonel, now it’s yerself that’s fond of a joke. Whin we swung out in the lane ’n ye told us to charge, if ye had jist tipped me a wink, and said, ‘Mike, me lad, I don’t mane it, I’m only joking,’ me head would be as sound this minit as your own.”

The laugh was on the colonel, and he enjoyed it most heartily.

Dear old Mike! He answered the last “roll call” only a few years ago, and “passed over the river.”

The first time I met him after the war was at the general reunion of the U. C. V. Association in this city in 1897. I had gone to the headquarters of the Arkansas veterans looking for him, and learned he was out looking for me. There were a number of the old company present, and as I stood chatting with them about the old days, some one remarked, “Yonder comes Kelley now.” Looking up the street we saw him coming, with his hat off, mopping the perspiration from his face.

“Let’s see if he will know him, boys,” said one, as they clustered around me.

“Find him, Mike?” one of them asked, as he came up.

“No, bad luck to it; but I’ve been hot on his thrail these two hours past, ’n have nearly run the legs uv me off intirely. The little devil is as hard to catch now as he was thirty years ago, when he was riding that old gray horse,” he answered, as he threw himself down in the shade with a grunt of disgust.

There was a general laugh, but my heart was in my throat, and I did not join in until the others had ceased. In an instant he was on his feet. “I would know that laugh in a thousand,” he exclaimed, looking eagerly around. I pushed my way through and stood before him.

The steel-gray eyes I had so often seen flash defiance in the face of death were dim with tears as his hand clasped mine, and when I felt his arm around my shoulder, his bearded cheek against mine, there were drops that were not perspiration falling from my own face.

Maudlin sentiment of two old men, you say? Yes, if you choose to call it such; but a sentiment formed and welded together over and over and over again in the fiery crucible of battle and one that death alone can break.

How varied, great and wonderful are the blessings which a beneficent Creator showers universally upon this cosmos of ours for the benefit of mankind, and is it not strange that a majority of us fail to see these blessings, which are everywhere before our eyes? One of these blessings which the tillers of the soil are the recipients thereof, and which very few of them recognize, is the beneficial results derived therefrom. That is the importance of crop residue as a help in maintaining the fertility of the soil. Nature is a great economist—she allows nothing to go to waste. Everything is turned to some account in the grand, economic plan. Even the stubble which is left after the grain is harvested, there is a use for it. Yet many of our farmers fail to see it. The farmers in the great wheat-raising states of the Northwest burn up their straw stacks when they want to plow the land for another wheat crop. This ought not to be. Nature has an important use for this crop residue. It ought to be returned to the land as manure. It was prodigality on their part to have sold the fertility of their land in the wheat. But it was compounding the offense when they burned up their crop residue. Because the axiom is, the more crop, the more crop residue, and the more crop residue the more dead vegetable matter to be oxidized. But for this wise provision made by an all-wise Creator, humanity would long since have perished with hunger from off the face of the earth. We do not wish to give out the impression that crop residue alone will maintain the fertility of the land, but to convey the idea of the importance of crop residue as a help in delaying the period when land which has been under cultivation for years, without manure (which is the rule in the United States) ceases to be profitable to cultivate.

“It is a fact both of scientific interest and of great practical importance, that the enrichment of a soil with nitrogen is confined to certain limits, which can, with great difficulty, be exceeded. The limit varies according to the conditions in which the soil is placed. A familiar instance of the limit is afforded by a pasture.

“We have seen when the arable land is laid down in grass an accumulation of nitrogen takes place in the surface soil. This accumulation may be slow or rapid, according to the treatment of the field, but in the case of an ordinary meadow the accumulation does not pass a certain point. After a certain number of years no further rise in nitrogen appears in the soil, although the external conditions of the meadow remain precisely the same as they were when the former accumulation of nitrogen took place. The influence of crop residue, Prof. Warington says, “where the ammonium salts were applied without ash constituents the produce was the smallest, and so was the nitrogen in the soil, and this nitrogen, like the crops, was a diminishing quantity. Where superphosphate was supplied with the ammonia the crop was considerably increased, and so was the nitrogen of the soil, which has shown little change in sixteen years. Where the ammonia was used with a full supply of phosphate and potash the produce was the largest; the nitrogen, too, of the soil was largest, and shows a tendency to rise.” “We see here at once a relation between the amount of the crop and the rise or fall of the nitrogen in the soil. The quantity of nitrogenous matter in a surface soil can only be maintained when the crop grown on the soil reaches a certain annual amount. There is, in fact, an annual waste of the nitrogenous capital of the soil, and if the proportion of the nitrogen of the soil is to be maintained there must be an equal annual addition of fresh nitrogenous organic matter. This is furnished to the soil in the form of crop residue, consisting of dead roots, leaves and stubble of a former crop, and the dead matter of weeds. When this crop residue is of large amount, as in[418] the cultivation of red clover or in any case of green manuring, or when smaller residues are left untouched by the plow and allowed to accumulate, as in the case of a pasture, the conditions for an increase in the nitrogen of the soil are present. When, on the other hand, the crop residue is nil, as in the case of a bare fallow, or very small, as upon unmanured land, there is either none, or an insufficient replacement of the annual loss of organic matter in the soil, and the nitrogen of the soil consequently falls.” “The proportion of nitrogen in a soil can only be maintained when the supply of ash constituents (phosphates and potash) is sufficient to furnish the necessary amount of crop and crop residue.”

The nitrogenous organic matter contained in soils is for the most part an insoluble substance, a fact of the greatest importance for the maintenance of the fertility of the soil. While in this condition it is of little use to the higher order of plants among which our ordinary crops are included. To become available as plant food, it must be oxidized and rendered soluble, but as soon as this step is effected it becomes liable to be lost by drainage. Not many years ago we would have been satisfied in explaining the oxidation which occurs in soil as due to a simple contact with oxygen. We now take a different view of these changes. We know that the organic matter of a soil is split up and oxidized by means of living agents. A fertile soil is, in fact, teeming with life of many kinds. Many of these living agents are quite invisible to our eyes, and yet are performing changes on a great scale, upon the accomplishment of which the growth of our food crops depends.

The living agents which attack the organic matter of soil may be classed as (1) animal life—worms and insects; (2) fungi; (3) bacteria. The worms, beetles, larvae, etc., in a surface soil feed on the recently dead vegetable matter left by the crop or weeds which previously had possession of the soil. The carbon of this vegetable food is oxidized in their bodies and exhaled as carbonic acid, while the nitrogen is excreted in simple forms of combination. The fungi also feed on the nitrogenous organic matter of soil; carbon is oxidized in their cells and exhaled as carbonic acid, while their dead nitrogenous tissues restore to the soil a great part of the nitrogen which they had assimilated.

The conditions which favor the complete oxidation effected by bacteria are aeration of the soil by tillage, the presence of a suitable amount of water and of calcium carbonate, and a high temperature.

It has been mentioned above of the natural limits to the accumulation of nitrogen in the soil. Prof. Warington thinks he can now perceive some of the causes of such limits.

“The addition of organic matter to a soil either as crop or weed residue, or as farmyard manure, at once makes that soil a suitable home for the animal life—the fungi—and the bacteria, whose function it is to reduce organic matter to the condition of inorganic matter. An increase of organic plant residue or manure thus creates some of the conditions favorable to its own destruction. The rate of oxidation in the soil is now no longer what it was; the oxidizing agents have increased with the material to be oxidized. If, therefore, a soil is laid down in pasture or receives an annual dressing of farmyard manure, the nitrogen in that soil will only increase so long as the annual increment of organic matter exceeds the annual decrement by oxidation. If this increment is a limited quantity it will be met before long with an army of destroyers competent to effect its destruction. The richest soils are thus the most liable to waste and demand the greatest exercise of the farmer’s skill to preserve their condition. When the conditions of the soil are changed, when the pasture is plowed up or the arable land is left without manure, there is at first a rapid loss of nitrogen, but the rate of loss soon diminishes. The organic matter most easily attacked has disappeared. The army of oxidizing organisms has been reduced to starvation. A partial equilibrium is established when the annual destruction of organic matter amounts to little more than the annual residue of crop and weeds; but an absolute[419] equilibrium is reached only when the annual loss by nitrogen is equaled by the atmospheric supply. In every case nature seeks to establish an equilibrium.”

For the American farmer to obtain good heavy crops, and consequently, large crop residues, there is only one way to do it. Invest some money in ground phosphate rock, and after applying it, plant a legume—cow peas, red clover, etc., and the investment will pay you the biggest dividend you ever received in your life.

Alfalfa will grow as well in the South, under right conditions, as it will in any country in the world without irrigation. Alfalfa sown in the South under wrong conditions will prove a discouraging failure. So, therefore, it is far from any desire of mine to encourage unwise experimentation or lead men to make unavailing efforts to grow alfalfa upon unfit soils or with wrong methods.

Let us consider the few essential things that alfalfa demands. First, a soil that is not sour.

Next, a soil that is well enough drained so that water does not saturate it at any time of the year, unless for a day or two following very heavy rainfalls.

Then a soil that is rich in the mineral elements that go to make plants grow, phosphorus and potash, and well supplied, too, with nitrogen.

And, to crown all, a soil supplied with abundant vegetable matter or “humus.”

Given these things, and the South’s sun and skies, alfalfa will grow in most any part of the South and will yield annually four or five cuttings a year of the richest forage either to feed green, or to cure into hay.

An acre of proper soil devoted to alfalfa will produce double the total amount of available food for animals that an acre of corn will, and of a higher class of nutrients. That is because the alfalfa is so rich in protein, the muscle[420] and blood-building elements that are so much needed in a ration for all young animals, for dairy cows or any animals giving milk to their young.

To prepare an acre of land for alfalfa may in some instances involve considerable labor and expense. If the work is rightly done it will be lavishly repaid by the grateful alfalfa plants, and after they have grown upon the soil for a series of years they will leave it richer than they found it.

If each farm in the South will grow alfalfa, even if no more than two or three acres, it will enormously increase its prosperity and wealth. There are sections of the South where easily there may be developed large alfalfa fields. There are other sections where to grow alfalfa will require thought, effort, expense and care. Success when reached will richly reward all this effort.

It is most unwise to sow alfalfa seed upon unfertile soils or without right preparation of the soil and attention to a few important details.

Nevertheless, the few things needful, are of easy attainment, for there is no mystery about alfalfa growing.

Let us take up the essentials of alfalfa growing: first, that the soil must be sweet.

It is a new thought to Southern farmers, perhaps, that soils are some times sour. They may be sour upon limestone land, but are more apt to be sour away from the lime.

If they are water-logged during part of the year, they are most apt to be sour. This acidity comes probably from the decay within the soil of vegetable matter, though some soils very deficient in humus are acid. An evidence of acidity is seen when clovers fail to thrive, and certain weeds appear in the meadows.

The appearance of “sorrel,” the little red-topped weed that is seen in so many meadows of recent years, is an indication of acidity. A surer indication is the gradual disappearance of red clover and the difficulty experienced in making it grow.

Lime is the cure of acid soils, though drainage is often needed along with lime. It may be applied to a freshly-plowed surface at the rate of from one to two tons per acre of air slaked or ground lime, and in some countries ground limestone is used with good results.

Lime is not itself a fertilizer, but it makes the land sweet so that clovers may grow and by their presence bring about enrichment of the soil.

Alfalfa is a clover, one of the best, since it is of very long life and surprising vigor upon proper soil.

The South needs the use of thousands of tons of lime, in connection with manures. Liming poor soils without manuring may not bring much benefit since there may be too little plant food even when the soil is sweetened.

The older regions of the world, where advanced agriculture has been practiced for centuries, use great amounts of lime. The writer has seen great chalk pits in England whence had been taken thousands of tons of chalk (a soft limestone) to enrich the adjoining farms.

In some parts of the South, however, where red clover thrives, the land has in it enough lime, and is in no need of sweetening. We will then consider the next requirement—drainage.

Alfalfa grows through the aid of little bacteria that inhabit its rootlets. These bacteria must have air. Therefore the flooding of the earth by complete saturation of water destroys the life of the bacteria and of the alfalfa itself.

If a post-hole dug three feet deep in the field where it is desired to sow alfalfa shows water standing in it for more than a few days in the year, that soil needs under-draining before being sown to alfalfa.

In general, the depth to the water level should be about forty feet. If there is a greater depth it is generally better.

Now, we will consider the matter of fertility. Alfalfa feeds deep in the soil after it gets established and it secures a part of its nitrogen through the aid of the bacteria from the air.

Nevertheless, it is a gross feeder upon phosphorus and potash and cannot secure these from the air. Nor will it at first secure all its needed nitrogen from the air.

Therefore, land destined to be sown to alfalfa should be rich when sown. If[421] it is not rich it should be made rich before seed is consigned to it.

Next, comes the need of humus in the soil. Now “humus” is simply decayed vegetable matter, and is best supplied through turning under vegetable growths such as cowpeas, or through the use of stable manures. Humus in the soil does several very needed things.

First, it supplies a direct plant food through the nitrogen, phosphorus and potash that it contains, being especially rich in nitrogen.

Next, in decaying it forms compounds that attack the locked-up mineral elements of the soil and sets them free to be absorbed by the plants. Then it absorbs moisture and makes the soil more slow in drying, besides preventing the close packing that comes with puddling in clay soils deficient in humus.

And as important as anything, perhaps most important of all, it puts “life” into the soil. Soils with humus in them are really alive, for the decaying vegetable matter attracts bacteria of many sorts that in their life and death and decay form many compounds that the plants can absorb and thus directly increase fertility and make plants grow.

Good soils are truly “live” soils, filled with legions of microscopic forms of life, most of it beneficial to the higher orders of growing plants useful to men.

Poor soils, deficient in humus, cold, puddled clays, are literally “dead” soils and speak sadly of a dying civilization and decaying people.

Alfalfa, then, revels in a deep, rich, sweet soil. How are we to provide it in the South?

First, there are many river bottoms that are admirably adapted to alfalfa, being made up of rich alluvial loams, pervious to air and moisture, and not holding a surplus of moisture. On these soils alfalfa usually thrives splendidly.

Next, there are new lands freshly cleared where robber crops have not yet had time to take out the fertility. Often these newer soils will respond wonderfully with alfalfa. Some very steep mountain sides are growing alfalfa finely when sown on freshly-cleared surfaces.

Some lands are naturally fertile enough so that they will, with little aid, grow alfalfa very well. Nevertheless, even the best of the old cleared parts need manure before being sown to alfalfa.

We had best admit at the outset that most of the old fields of the South need enrichment to make them produce good alfalfa. And the best way to enrich them is with liberal coatings of stable manures.

Few farmers are aware of the great value of manures. They enrich far in excess of the actual potash phosphorus and nitrogen carried.

Liberal dressings, then, of barnyard manure, applied before it has leached in rain, is the best preparation for alfalfa sowing.

If one has not enough manure to prepare the soil for ten acres let him attempt to sow but five. If he can’t manure five let him content himself with two. Two acres of vigorous alfalfa will yield as much as ten acres of sickly, thin stuff on unprepared soil.

And the two acres will make forage enough to make a further supply of manure, so that he can next season enrich added acres and sow them to alfalfa. But while stable manure is the best thing and really almost indispensable to success in growing alfalfa upon old Southern fields, it can be greatly helped by being re-enforced by mineral fertilizers.

“Floats,” or finely-ground phosphatic rock not treated with sulphuric acid, is a very cheap supply of phosphorus. This phosphorus is not available when applied to some soils deficient in humus.

But when floats are mixed with stable manure in some way the phosphorus is made available and the plants can get it. Therefore, the wise farmer sprinkles his stables with floats which absorb the ammonia and makes the stable smell sweet, and when the manure is applied its value has been almost doubled. Stable manure fortified with floats is the thing to apply to the soil to make alfalfa grow.

This manure may be applied to a preceding crop of corn or tobacco, if it is applied heavily enough so that there is a large residue left.

Or it may be applied directly before the ground is plowed for alfalfa. This is a safe way. It may be turned under or harrowed in or disked in or left to[422] lie on the surface through the winter and the land plowed in the early spring.

Just get it over the land in any way and as soon as convenient after it is made; it will do the work.

Apply as much as twenty-five tons to the acre and more if you have it. This will be a help, but in strong Southern clays there is no need to fear putting on an abundance; it will not leach away, and the more humus you get in that soil the better your alfalfa will be. Do not be discouraged by this information; you can afford to use the manure to start a crop that maintains itself and makes such a large amount of forage that will, if fed and the manure saved, in turn enrich yet other fields for many years.

Late in winter or early in spring the land may be plowed. It should be broken deep and as soon as the land is ready to work, it should be harrowed to a good seed bed.

Alfalfa wants a firm seed bed, so that the little rootlets find an unbroken way down into the moist earth beneath.

At a little later than time for sowing oats, say the last week in March, after danger of hard freezing is over, sow the seed. A peck of alfalfa seed, fifteen pounds, is enough to the acre; more is waste. There are in a bushel 14,448,000 individual alfalfa seeds. To sow fifteen pounds per acre would put on eighty-three seeds to the square foot. Twelve plants to the square foot are all that will grow to maturity.

The seed may be sown broadcast and harrowed in. It may be sown broadcast and covered by drilling in after it a bushel to the acre of spring barley, an excellent nurse crop. The beardless barley is the best. Or a half bushel of oats sown on an acre will serve as a nurse crop, only that in this case the oats must be cut for hay as soon as bloom appears and before they lodge.

The land after seeding must be left smooth so that the mower may be run over it close to the ground.

There may be sown fertilizer with the alfalfa to help the manure and it will probably be well repaid.

After the alfalfa is sown, if the land is very dry and cloddy it should be rolled. If it is moist, a plank drag should make it smooth and level.

At the time of sowing, if some earth from an old alfalfa field can be had, it is well to make it fine and sow it over the field at the rate of about 100 pounds to the acre, or soil on which sweet clover (mellilotus) has grown. The object of this is to transfer some of the bacteria that thrive on alfalfa roots to the new field. It is as the housewife puts yeast in her bread.

However, if the manure has been put into the soil and it is not sour, the seed itself will carry enough bacteria to shortly innoculate the field. These bacteria increase very rapidly in soils filled with humus.

A good test of whether a field will grow alfalfa or not is to observe whether it contains earthworms (fish worms). If it does not the condition is wrong for alfalfa culture.

After this sowing nothing should be done to the field until the barley is ripe or the oats in bloom. It may then be cut close to the ground. This close cutting is good for the young alfalfa, which needs clipping at this time.

Set the binder then to cut as close as possible, and if it must be cut high for any reason follow at once with the mower and clip the stubble close. Then let the alfalfa alone to make a second growth. If there should come rain it will grow rapidly for about forty-five days or a little longer. After that it may turn yellow and cease to grow.

That means that rust has struck it. Leaf rust is the pest of alfalfa in all Eastern States. The remedy for rust is mowing off the stems as close to the ground as practicable.

If there is enough hay to be worth saving rake it off and cure it. If weeds are the main growth, allow them to lie and mulch the land, supposing them not to be thick enough to smother it.

When winter sets in have a growth a foot high standing to protect the crowns and hold the snow. Do not ever pasture alfalfa the first season. Do not ever allow stock to tramp over it in cold weather, nor drive across it with wagons.

Oftentimes the fall is a good time to sow alfalfa in the South. When there[423] is enough moisture in the land to start it well in August or September it may succeed well, sown alone. The manner would be to plow a wheat stubble as soon as possible after harvest, applying a light coat of manure, and immediately working it down to a good seed bed, using every care to prevent its drying out.

The way to do this is to have a harrow and roller in the field when the breaking is done. Let the plows run a quarter of a day and finish out that half day by rolling and harrowing the ground to bring it to a degree of fineness that will enable it to hold moisture.

No nurse crop is needed when alfalfa is sown in the fall; it must be about an inch deep and should not be sown when there is merely a little moisture in the ground with dry soil beneath, lest it sprout and perish before rains come.

Weeds will not trouble this fall-sown alfalfa much and it makes four crops of hay the next year, though not quite so heavy crops as the spring-sown alfalfa should make.

The time to make alfalfa hay is when it is about half in bloom and before the leaves have fallen from the stem. That will be about the tenth of May. Take this first crop off promptly to secure the hay while it is in its prime and to allow the next crop to come on.

Cure the hay by raking into small windrows while it is yet tough and cocking in rather tall and slender cocks so that the air may get at the hay. Do not delay raking until the hay is dry or you will lose many of the leaves, and they are worth as much, pound for pound, as wheat bran.

The hay may cure in the cocks if the weather is fine, or they may be opened out and sunned and again piled up and hauled to the barn. When only a few tons are put together the hay must be pretty dry else it may mould. When putting many tons in one rick or mow the hay need not be so well dried, as the heat prevents moulding.

Alfalfa hay will keep well in mow or rick, but when ricked it must be covered with wild grass, straw or boards, as it will not shed rain well. There will be four cuttings the second year, and these should be taken off when the proper stage of growth has been reached, whether the alfalfa is long or short. When it begins to bloom, the leaves to rust, and buds appear on the bases of the stems, it must be cut, else it will cease to grow and no subsequent crop need be looked for.

If, perchance from drought, the second or third crop happens to be very short, it must be mown off as promptly as though it was a good growth and then the succeeding crop, should there be rain, may be very much heavier than the poor one removed. Had it not been cut, however, this good crop would not have been secured.

On land rightly prepared, with favorable seasons of sufficient rain, alfalfa in the South may yield as much as six or eight tons to the acre. A yield of four to five tons may more confidently be expected.

Alfalfa will endure in profitable condition on suitable soils for from six to twelve years. Grasses encroach upon it and may be destroyed by disking after the roots are tough enough to endure it. A spike-toothed harrow to follow the disk will more surely tear out the grass. The harrow will not injure the alfalfa roots.

When once well established an annual drilling in of liberal amounts of phosphorus and potash will greatly stimulate growth on most soils and be repaid several times over in the increased yield.

When it is desired to plow the field it may be turned with a very sharp plow and strong team and the roots are readily killed when cut off. Any crop will yield very abundantly after alfalfa, corn and tobacco being perhaps best suited to follow alfalfa, since small grain may lodge because of the exceeding richness of the land.

After one or two crops have been taken off of the land it should again be manured and sown to alfalfa, which will take much more readily and yield much more abundantly than it did the first sowing.

In conclusion I ask the farmers of the South not to sow alfalfa upon poor or unprepared soil or in a wrong manner, since by so doing, failure is almost assured[424] and the whole cause of alfalfa culture will receive a serious setback. I believe, however, that wherever a man has learned to grow alfalfa he will rejoice all his days and be the richer, more intelligent and better man for it and his neighborhood will be helped by the example of good farming.

I had not seen the old man for several months, but I supposed he was still prospering on his little farm, when he walked in the other day without knocking, took his seat by the fire, and casually remarked that March was always a bad month on rheumatism.

“Why, how are you, old man?” I said, laying down my pen and seeing him for the first time. “I haven’t seen you for several months.”

“No, I don’t reck’n you is,” he said quietly, “an’ de reason is, I ain’t seed myself—I’ve been dead!”

“What!” I exclaimed—“dead—are you joking?”

I looked at him closely, but I saw no evidence of insanity—nothing to indicate that he had yet reached his dotage. However, I thought it best to pass him something for his rheumatism. He quaffed it off so naturally that I knew he was all right and would tell it in his own way.

“Ennything happened ter speak of sense I be’n dead?” he asked, indifferently enough, as he smacked his lips and wiped them on the back of his hand.

I was anxious to hear how he had died, but I knew any eagerness on my part would spoil it all, so I replied:

“Why, no, old man—nothing new. But you have heard of Jupiter Pluvius, perhaps, and his home above the clouds. Well, he has kept busy this spring with his watering pot.”

“Heard of ’im?” asked the old man, with a show of wrath—“why, I knowed ’im—he was a blue-gum nigger—that Jupiter was—that c’u’d pick five hundred pounds o’ cotton in a day, an’ he run off wid my secon’ wife an’ jined de Yankees. But he didn’t lib whar you placed de rickerlicshun ob his cohabitashun—he libbed up on Bear Creek. No, I got no hard feelin’s about it—for, onbeknownst to hisse’f he done me a great favor. No, I ain’t got nothin’ ag’in’ him, nur de Yankees, nur’r.”

“I guess not,” I said, “for since the Spanish war we are all Yankees now.”

“All Yankees now? Jes’ lemme tell you, sonny, dah’s one dat ain’t. No, suh, I am a S’uthern gemman, an’ I still b’leeves de nigger was made to belong to somebody dat ’uld feed ’im an’ mek ’im beehave. All Yankees now? Boss, I sho’ am ’shamed of you! De naixt thing you’ll hab us all Jews or Japs. Wal, dat’s all right, but I b’leeves I told you ’bout co’rtin’ dat ’ar widder—”

“You got her, didn’t you?”

“Boss, did you urver kno’ ennybody to go after a widder an’ not get her? I’ve got jes’ one rule fur co’rtin’—set up close, agree on all p’ints, an’ dat’ll fetch on love. Never ’spute wid a widder, ’specially ef you’re c’ortin’ her. Wait twell you’re marri’d an’ den bu’st a wash-bo’rd over her haid ef she don’t beehave.

“Did you urver notice, boss, how cu-is a widder is about dat ur c’ortin’ bus’ness? So diff’unt frum a gal. Now, when you co’rt a gal, she ain’t gwine say nuffin’ fur a long time. She let you co’rt her an’ co’rt her, an’ sum day, when she fin’ she lubs you, she’ll jes’ thro’ her arms aroun’ you’ neck an’ say, ‘Darlint, I am your’n—take me!’

“But wid a widder, nobody ain’t nurver got one of ’em to say ‘yes’ yit—but dey manage to git dar all de same.

“An’ dat wus de way wid dis heah widder I co’rted. De fus’ night I went to see her she ’lowed she hated de very groun’ I walked on, yet she lemme hol’ her han’ all de time. De nex’ night I was wuss’n p’lzen, yet she lemme squeeze her. De third time I was meaner ’n[425] dog-fennel, yet I was good enuff to hug her. De nex’ time I cum she ’lowed I wus de mos’ contempt’us, po’ ignoble, bandy-legged has-been dat ever was, an’ stell I sho’ did kiss her. De las’ night she fix me—I didn’t think she’d hab me to save my life, an’ like a fool I begged her wuss’n a little weaned calf beggin’ fur milk. Dat wus jes’ whut she was layin’ fur, an’ so, entirely onbeknownst to me, she had de preacher wid de license dar hid in de closet, an’ I sw’ar ter goodness, boss, befo’ de cock crow twice dat ’ar ’oman had marri’d me thrice!

“An’ den I died,” he added solemnly. “Yes, boss, I died dead, too. You see, it all happen’ at de weddin’ supper. You see, boss, de ole man had allers been used ter drinkin’ sho’ nuff licker, but dat night dey dose me up wid a konkoction of pine-top, asserfederty an’ buzzard’s bre’f, an’ fo’ I knowed it I wus dead. Why, boss, dey burried me on de fus’ Sat’d’y arter de secon’ Sunday in January, an’ I didn’t rise ergin ’twell de Chusday arter de secon’ Sunday in March, an’ ef dat whiskey hadn’t er bin es good in its raisin’ grace as ’twas in its fallin’ grace, I’d er bin dar yit.”

“Would you like to kno’ what a man sees, an’ how he feels arter he’s dead, boss?”

Would I? I gave the old man another dose of the heaven-brewed to help him along.

“Wal, hit’s about de cu-isest feelin’ dat eber was felt,” he said, after awhile. “One minnit you am libin’ an’ de nex’ you am trablin’ ’long de road to Jurdan, an’ you can’t he’p yo’self to save yo’ life. You can’t stop, you can’t sot down, you can’t turn back. You jes’ seem to be drawed along like you was standin’ on a slidin’ sidewalk run on undergroun’ cables. But de road is buterful. Flowers bloom all aroun’ you. Birds sing in de sunshine on gold trees, an’ fishes swim in lakes of melted di’monds. Inste’d of bein’ outdoors an’ breathin’ air, you ’peer to be movin’ along under de bright roof ob a cut-glass house, or in a big bottle ob rarerfied perfume, wid de sun a blazin’ stopper in de roof.

“I didn’t kno’ whar I wus gwine to, an’ I didn’t keer—all I know’ wus I wus gwine, thang Gord!

“But, bimeby, everthing stop whar two roads met, an’ I know’d one of ’em went to heab’n, but I cudn’t say which one to save my life. I got down on my knees, an’ prayed fur light, but no light cum, an’ ’stid of it I heurd all de little birds singin’ in de gold trees all aroun’ me:

“Dat mos’ par’lyze me, boss, an’ I’d a gi’n ennything ef I hadn’t spent so much time aroun’ race-tracks whilst I wus alive an’ had spent mo’ of it lookin’ for dis heah track, an’ tryin’ to fin’ out which road to take. Dar dey bofe lay, jes’ alike, shinin’ in de glow of eternity. An’ yit de very silence seem ter speak in thunder-tones, an’ de stillness was louder dan de noise of battle. It all depended on de path I tuck.

“Bimeby, I thort of Ole Marster’s little boy dat I seed die so long ago, an’ dat I useter nuss an’ carry in my arms, an’ of all de little chillun I seed bohn one day, an’ die de nex’, an’ I got down on my knees in de golden dust ob dat ’ar road an’ I look fur ter see if dar was enny baby tracks dar, fur I knowed whar de baby tracks wus, dat wus de road dat leads to heab’n.”

The old man stopped, and I saw him brush away a tear. He had said something as great as Shakespeare, and I, myself, had to take a turn around the room to stop before the picture of a little curly-head over the mantel, and listen again for the prattle of a laughter which began one spring with a bird’s note and ended with the first snow in a new-made grave.

When I came back, the old man was laughing. Tears—smiles—twins that dwell in the secret chambers of the heart, and they join hands so quickly at times!

“Bimeby,” he went on, “I look up de road, an’ heah cum ole Kunnel Ketchum, er-splittin’ de dust ob de golden road, an’ a-moppin’ his ole bald head wid a red bandanna handkerchief, an er-lookin’ es pi’us in death as he was sancterfied in life. Now, boss, you kno’ de Kunnel was one ob dese here prayin’ lawyers—dat you kin always safely brand as De Debbil’s[426] Own—an’ he died jes’ ’fo’ I did, an’ he wus awful smart an’ awful slick, an’ whilst I didn’t hab much idee he knowed enny mo’ ’bout de road to heab’n dan I did, I was bankin’ on his ’bility to find it out fust.

“‘Hello, Wash,’ sezee, ‘which way you gwine?’

“Sez I: ‘Kunnel, I’m cogertatin’ on which ob dese heah roads leads to heab’n.’

“‘Oh,’ sez he, ‘I kin show you which road ter take. I dun bin up dar an’ file my brief wid Jedge Peter at de gate, but dar wus some leetle irregularerties in de pleadings, an’ I’ve come back to answer his demur.’

“Den he laugh, an’ say: ‘Wash, de ole feller don’t kno’ a little bit o’ law, an’ hit’s de easiest thing in de wurl’ to wuck him ef you’ll only do es I say. Now, when I went up an’ presented him my church papers, an’ tole ’im who I wus, deac’n an’ all dat, he ’lowed he nurver had larned to read English an’ he throwed my papers over a bluff, whar I seed some smoke risin’ an’ swellin’ sorter like de smoke ob a passin’ freight engine, an’ den he look at me an’ ax if I wus ridin’ or walkin’? Sez I, “Sir, I am walkin.” “Dat settles it,” sez he, “nobody erfoot will urver git in dis gait, and es fur dat artomobeel crowd,” sez he, “dey go on to hell widout stoppin’, fur dey carry de scent of hell erlong wid ’em, ennyhow. No, sah, Kunnel,” sez he, “you gotter ride a hoss to git into heah. We need ’em to pull de cherriots in heaben”—an’ de Kunnel look wise an’ stroke his chin-whiskers.

“‘Now, Wash,’ he went on, soft-like, ‘I’ve got a plan my color’d frien’ dat ull fix ole Peter an’ let us bofe in. I kno’ de road—I’ve bin dar befo’, so you be de hoss an’ I’ll be de rider, an’ Peter will throw open de gate, an’ let us bofe in. Dey’s nuffin’ lak a leetle brains, Wash—a leetle brains in dis wurl’ an’ de nex’.’

“Wal, boss, dat all look mighty conniv’rous ter me, an’ es I had been all my life a-totin’ de burdens ob de white man, it ’peered mighty nachul to keep it up. So I got down on my all-fo’s, de Kunnel he mounted me, an’ I started up de pike in a jog trot. But I hadn’t gone fur befo’ de ole Kunnel punch me in de side wid his heels, yanked my mouf nearly off wid de gallus bridle an’ de shoestring bit he fixed up fur me befo’ he started, an’ yelled out:

“‘Change dat gait, you ole fool, do you think I would ride into heab’n on a trottin’ hoss when I c’u’d ride a easy pacer?’

“I seed de pint, an’ shifted.

“‘Ah, dat’s better,’ sez he, ‘an mo’ restful.’

“At de gate Marse Peter stop us, an’ say: ‘Am you ridin’ or walkin’ suh?’

“‘Ridin’ dis time, yo’ Honoh,’ sey de Kunnel.

“‘Good,’ sez Peter, a-glancin’ at me, ‘but I don’t like de looks ob dat swayback scrub you’re ridin’, so I’ll jes’ let you hitch ’im to de fence, but you kin walk in!’

“An’ de ole Kunnel, he hitch me to de fence sho’ ’nuff, an’ walked in widout battin’ his eye or sayin’ much obleeged, an’ dar I wus champin’ a shoestring bit, tied to de fence ob heab’n, wid a gallus line, an’ dodgin’ a hoss-fly es big as a turkey gobbler dat wus buzzin’ aroun’ over de bluff nigh-by.

“Peter look at me a long time, sorter smilin’ an’ sorter mad, an den he sez: ‘Thort you’d fool me, did you? Wal, for dis decepshun, I’ll turn you into a sho’ nuff hoss,’ and befo’ I c’u’d say scat, boss, I wus a black Hal pacer, wid two white feet, a star, snip, black mane and tail, so help me Gord, an’ dat ’ar hoss-fly es big es a turkey was buzzin’ aroun’ tryin’ to bore a hole in me.

“Gimme anurver dram, boss.”

I thought he was entitled to it.

“But dat wa’n’t all. F’um dat day on dey didn’t do nuffin’ but use me on dat road, carryin’ folks up to de gate, but nurver gittin’ in myse’f. An’ dey wucked me ’twell I almos’ drapped dead ag’in. An’ I carried Jews an’ Turks an’ Chinese, an’ eb’ry kind o’ man dat urver libbed, ’twell de golden pike wus a pile ob brass, an’ de sun was a furnace ob fiah, an’ me de hoss, a-doin’ all de totin’.

“An’ ebry day ole Peter ’u’d lead me to de bluff an’ let me look ober on de pit down below. An’ dar I seed folks I nurver dreamed ’u’d be dar, in dis wurl’, an’ I failed ter see udders dat I thort ’u’d be dar on de hottes’ gridiron.[427] Dar wus heathens a-wonderin’ what it all meant, an’ Christians still ’sputin’ on baptism an’ santerfercashun, an’ ev’ry one ob ’em, boss, a-holdin’ a fat Afercan heathen ’twixt him an’ de fiah. Greeks, Turks, niggers, Jews, Spanyards—all dar, boss. Dar wus doctors, still a-lyin’ an’ lookin’ wise, an’ when de yudders called fur water de debbil had ’em to dose ’em wid quinine an’ calermel, or cut open de reel bad men huntin’ fur de ’pendix. Lawyers? Boss, if hell only had a bookcase an’ a dirty carpet, cuspedores an’ a sweatin’ lot ob bad-smellin’ jurors, you’d a-thort it wus some ord’nary co’te-house wid a fiah attachment. In one corner dey had penned off a lot ob ole wimmens, all talkin’ an’ argyin’ at onct, an’ I ax Peter whut dey wus, an’ he sed dey wus de muthers ob de wives ob men, an’ dey had to be penned off dar ter keep ’em frum runnin’ de place an’ bossin’ it deyselves.

“Dey wus all dar, boss—all but de babies, as I wus tellin’ you. Nurver did I heah de wail ob a little one come up frum de pit, nur de lisp ob a lullerby turned into moan. Fur de sweetes’ nurse dat eber a baby had, had sed, whilst He was on earth, ‘De little chillun I’ll take keer of them’—an’ dey had all gone to Him.

“Day arter day I seed dis; day arter day I carried nations on my back from de partin ob de two ways to de gate whar Peter stood, ’till I prayed to die ag’in.

“An’ one day, when I thort I c’u’dn’t stan’ it no longer, dar come along a smilin’, quiet man, wid a kind look in his eyes. An’ dey tole him to mount me an’ ride me up to de hill. But he looked me all ober, my puffed legs an’ sore feet an’ sweat-caked sides an’ drawn flank, an’ he said: ‘No—no—I wouldn’t ride into heab’n on the miz’zry ob a dumb beast.’

“An’ he fotch me some water to squench my thirt, an’ he tuck off de saddle an’ bathe my back, an’ he led me slowly up de hill. An’ when we come to de gate, Peter looked at ’im pow’ful ’stonished, an’ sed:

“‘Who am you, suh, dat w’u’d choose ter walk ter heab’n when you mout ride?’

“An’ den de man look at ’im quiet lak, an’ say, ‘I am nuffin heah, my Lord, an’ it matters not whut my name am. Call me one dat had no creed, an’ harmed no man, an’ lubbed all things, Lord, yea, eben de beasts of de fiel’s an’ de birds ob de air an’ de wurm dat creepeth. An’ so loving them, I would not ride eben to heaben’s gate on de miz’zry ob enny beast that Gord has made.’

“An’ den dar cum a burst ob music de lak of which no man eber heurd befo’, an’ a buterful gate on a ribber I nurver seed befo’ was flung wide open, an’ a voice sed: ‘Righteousness an’ truth hab met toguther. Whatsoever you did unto one ob dese you do it also unto me.’

“An’ Peter waved his han’ an’ de man was clothed in white an’ light, an’ went in de glory gate—de onlies’ one ob dem all dat went in, an’ I seed dat yudder gate dat ole Kunnel Ketchum an’ all went in wusn’t heab’n at all, but jus a side entrance to hell—an’ es he went in he waved his han’ at me’ an’ sed: ‘Go back ag’in to earth an’ learn to lub all things dat Gord hes made, an’ yo’ na’bur as yo’se’f,’ an’ befo’ I knowed it I stood in my grabe-clothes in de woods of Bigby, lookin’ fust at de grabe at my feet an’ den at de skies above me, an’ wonderin’ whut hed happen sence I died.”

The queer turn the old man gave to his story set me to thinking, and the hidden lesson touched me so greatly I could not reply. To throw off its weirdness, I finally said:

“Well, what had become of the widder?”

“I tole you I wus dead nigh six weeks. My wife, she’d marri’d ag’in, thank Gord, whilst I wus dead!”

The servants—overhearing the eager, excited footman’s message to the young mistress—had gathered hurriedly upon the rear porch to inspect the new arrival; cook, kitchen-maid, butler, flanked on one side by the parlor-maids, and on the other by a small errand boy, who peeped in open-mouthed wonder from beneath the elbow of the waiting footman.

The new arrival was a beautiful white mare. She had quickly thrown her head upward, and now stood at gaze—regarding them. Alert, ardent, with a slight distinguishable tremor of expectancy, but no trace of fear in either posture or regard—merely bright inquiry.

“She was the incarnation of the Arab of romance;” lithe, delicately tapering limbs, satin skin shimmering in the sunlight, pink nostrils flaring wide from her quick breath, eyes glowing with intelligence, and, withal, a thing of beauty, standing, as it were, transfixed in passionate silence.

When the mistress of the house at last came down the great wide stairway, the group fell back forming a semi-circle, leaving her face to face with the bright object of interest.

“So that is the horse,” she said, in faint astonishment, which, however, grew gradually into an expression of pure admiration and wonder; for the beauty she beheld was little short of marvelous.

She turned suddenly to the servants with a perplexed gesture. “Is the brougham at the door?” she asked. The footman signified that it was. “Tell Thomas to come here.” The coachman a moment later had fixed his eyes upon the newcomer that had attracted the group. At length, his decorous gravity gave way to a smile of distinct pleasure, expressive of the praise that seemed to tremble upon his lips; but, he remained silent, a martyr to his training, his very features admirably correct.

“Is that a well-bred horse, Thomas?” demanded the young mistress.

“It certainly is, ma’am, if looks count for anything,” replied Thomas.

“Very well bred?”

“I’m sure ma’am, the creature must be perfectly so; I’ve never seen anything so fine ma’am, ’pon my word,” he continued, the swelled veins of his forehead betraying his stifled enthusiasm.

“Do you mean by that, Thomas, you have never seen that horse before?”

Thomas hesitated.

“Say what you wish to say, Thomas,” prompted the young mistress, with a hasty glance at his face.

“Thanky, ma’am. Well, you know, ma’am, that your lawyer, sometime last fall, had the poor master’s trainer sell off some of the horses from his stable. I’m sure, ma’am, that this is the one the trainer complained so much of selling, but Mr. Grannan had offered a big price, and the lawyer made him sell her.”

She had already stepped forward to caress the eager, gazing animal, timidly, for she could not resist the earnest, entreating look it bestowed, but, when Thomas spoke the word “master,” she drew back sharply and stood motionless.

“Never fear, ma’am,” said the coachman, “she won’t harm, ma’am.”

“So, it’s Mr. Grannan’s horse,” she repeated coldly; and then, hastily turning, she passed through the house to the front door, which the boy, anticipating her intention, with much dignity now held open. A moment later she had descended the steps, and was in her brougham with Thomas upon the box, and the austere footman gazing expectant at the window.

“To my lawyer’s office,” she said, calmly.

II

“The spring sunshine gilded the tops of the park trees. Here and there the branches of the tall elms spread their tinted green; while the maples and chestnuts glowed in almost the full glory of their new leaves.” Scarlet blossoms, on the otherwise apparently naked shrubs bedded in the green lawns, facades of the brown stone mansions and glass-fronted[429] shops, could be seen everywhere, on either side of the drive.

The scenes through which she now passed—looking upon, yet seeing dimly—aroused within her a miserable consciousness that the memory of her husband, who had once so much loved these very scenes, had also faded with the spring gladness into an amazing dimness.

So Grannan had sent her the horse! In the first year of her widowhood she had, by chance, met Grannan. It was on the occasion of the anniversary of her twenty-second birthday. She had a relative—an old aunt—who had visited her from San Francisco. She knew Grannan in her home there, and, meeting him in the city had invited him to her house to dine. In the beginning of the second year of her widowhood, Grannan had offered himself; but, the look that she had then given him, froze the declaration of love upon his lips, and caused him to feel and know the utter hopelessness of his offer. She had not seen him since then. And now, just at the end of the second year of widowhood, he had offered her the gift.

She had, at first, intended to keep it. Her husband had been intensely devoted to horses, and she, through his influence had cultivated a fondness she had always had for them, and which had steadily increased; but, the words of Thomas caused her to dismiss any idea she might have entertained toward harboring the gift.

The brougham stopped in front of the lawyer’s office. Presently that gentleman stepped forward and greeted her at the window. He soon verified the truthfulness of the statement of Thomas concerning the sale, adding that, despite the vehement protests of the trainer, he had deemed it unwise to reject the very extraordinary offer of Mr. Grannan.

Mr. Grannan, though, he continued, was known as an exceptionally fine judge of horses, and enjoyed a most enviable reputation among horsemen for the prodigious success his skill had achieved for him.

She informed him of her determination now, to absent herself from the city for perhaps an unusual time, and requested that all necessary letters of credit should be at once prepared and forwarded to her.

Then, signaling the footman and designating the cathedral, she bade the attorney adieu.

III

Walter Grannan, who was conversing with some of his fellow-members at the club, which was situated on a corner near the cathedral, was now coming hastily forward towards her, just as she had alighted from her brougham and ordered it not to await her, saying, she would walk home.

“It is very fortunate—at least for me,” he said. “I did so want to see you.”

“I am going away to-morrow, and—of course it’s about the horse,” she said, pleasantly.

He smiled as he noted the charm of her face. “I am to hope; then, that you will accept her?”

“Oh, but I just can’t,” she said, “while I must thank you so much for asking me.”

In a moment she was sorry almost that she had said it. His expression touched her; and, though she could not satisfy herself why she should care—what were the expressions of men’s faces to her?—still, the twit was there. She felt it keenly as she now gazed steadfastly ahead, as they walked slowly and silently along in the direction of the marble church.

“I also am decided to go away to-morrow,” she said, at length, in a quiet tone.

Nothing was said in reply.

The great spire of the cathedral towered above her. The tones of the organ came throbbing from within. A funeral cortege entered. There was a coffin, piled high with wreaths of flowers. There the same dread pomp and circumstance of death that was attendant upon her husband. She shuddered as she turned aside her head.

Yes! Yes! She would go—go to-morrow. She must go! In her nervousness her handkerchief dropped from her hand.

As Grannan bent forward to pick it up, he observed a single white flower that had fallen from the wreaths piled upon the coffin, and gathered this in his hand also. He started to offer it to her; but, observing the thoughtful, troubled look upon her face, refrained. They had now[430] stopped; and, a moment later when in a fit of abstraction he was attempting to pinion the flower to the lapel of his coat, she involuntarily seized his hand.

“What is it?” he asked.

Her face crimsoned as she instantly withdrew her hand, and struggled for composure. “Why—er, it’s bad luck,” she exclaimed.

“What’s bad luck?” asked he, with that peculiar tone of voice indicating that there was no answer for his query.

“Oh, nothing; silliness, mere nonsense,” she said, betraying signs of her agitation which Grannan, however, failed to discover. “And now,” she continued, “I must say good-bye, for you are going away, you say, and I must thank you, oh, I can’t say how much, for your offer of the beautiful horse.”

“And, do you really mean that you will not accept my gift?” he said, slowly.

She bit her lip and bent her eyes downward, while she moved the point of her shoe restlessly upon the stone paving.

“O, I might manage,” she at length began, hesitatingly, “if only to gratify your whim, to keep it, for a while; but—”

“You see,” he interrupted, “I wanted you to have something to remind—”

“Good-bye,” she repeated, smiling as she gave him her hand. “So you really go away to-morrow?”

“At once,” he said, gravely, as he pressed the hand she was now withdrawing from his own, and turned away.

She paused within the vestibuled entrance of the cathedral in what proved to be a vain endeavor to calm the turbulency of her feelings. The fingers of her gloved hand were still deadened by the pressure from which she had just released them. Her eyes had even mastered her will, and now sought with the intensity of eagerness, the dim outlines of a figure that was now lost amid the throng, now faintly visible, with its downcast head and slowly receding step. At last it vanished.

The unsteady, subdued, solemn tones of the great organ within again rolled tumultuously upon her. She stood struggling, as it were, with the overwhelming waves of sound. Both her eyes and memory seemed now to focus upon a receding past.

The dead face of her husband drifted from out the vacancy, so real that she started, stopped, then started again, slowly descending the steps.

She turned her face homeward. Unconscious of the tide of restless passers-by, and of the noise that roared imprisoned by the walls of the high buildings on either side of the street, she turned abstractedly from the square, lost in the depths of her meditations.

She was thinking of her husband. Thinking of a day on the race-course; the day upon which she had first met him. Of how she had then dreamed of his wonderful personality, and afterwards learned how easily and completely it had swayed her own. Of how untiring, faultlessly devotional had been his constant care for her, and of how precisely perfect and pleasureable had been their married life.

She grew desperate now, and upbraided herself distressingly to think that already he should have become to her “nothing more vital than a memory.”

Yes, after all, she would go. She would go to the scene where she had first met him, to San Francisco; her husband’s stable of horses was now there.

As she entered leisurely the door of her home, and was met by her maid in the hall, who relieved her of her wraps, she made known her intention of leaving on the morrow, and gave instructions to her to have everything in readiness for their departure. She then went from the rear porch of the house in the direction of the coachman’s quarters, to notify Thomas to make preparations desired. This, she had persuaded herself, was her real reason for going to the locality set apart for the horses; but, was it?

No sooner had Thomas been found than the very first question asked him was pertaining to the welfare of his charge. A few moments later, it was she who was gently caressing the milk-white, deer-head of the mare, with her soft hands, now stroking the shiny neck, now encircling it within her arms, while the warm breath from the pink nostrils fanned at intervals her fair brow, sending a-whirl some truant lock of her wavy hair.

“Thomas,” she now said, turning a face[431] full of inquiry upon the coachman, who had stood with a look of amazement, gazing upon the manifest interest and affection of the young mistress, “what is her name?”

“Well, ma’am,” he replied, assuming the air now of one who feels the importance of being the proud possessor of some rare bit of information, “ever since she played in the paddock, three years ago now, by her mother’s side, and the master would come and take her little head in his hands, just as you have, ma’am, and pinch her cheeks, and laugh at her odd pranks, he called her Cassandra.”

“Cassandra!” she repeated. “Then he must have loved her?”

“Oh, indeed he did, ma’am, she was his favorite, and the trainer knew it, too.”

“Thomas, we start for San Francisco in the morning. You are to go, and have in your especial care, Cassandra. When you have arrived there deliver her again into the hands of the trainer, with instructions that the best of attention be shown her.”

“Thanky, ma’am,” said Thomas. “I’m proud of my charge, ma’am, indeed I am, for she’s a plum picture.”

IV

Five weeks passed. With her aunt beside her, and with Thomas upon the box, the mistress was sweeping through a bright avenue in the far Western city. The sky had forgotten the storm of the day before, and the splendor of a noonday sun now slept upon its bosom. Nature was smiling, but the smile was not wholly in accord with the feelings of the mistress. A restless, fitful mood had settled upon her in the early morning, and she had ordered the drive, as she now frequently did, to the race course.

Her aunt, strange to say, was not a very garrulous old lady, and the dark, foreboding thoughts which persistently crept into the mind of the mistress, so perplexed her that she appeared dull. Since her husband’s death she had acquired the habit of pursuing at will her train of thought, and now she could not easily break it, even in the presence of others. Her thoughts now, as they had been much of late, were associated with the little “Cassandra.” She was sorely vexed with the chiding she at times administered to herself for the strong, though, perhaps, strange attachment she felt to be growing dally within her.

Was she then destined, as the very name would imply, to fall in love with Cassandra? Was she indeed to be fascinated, lured to what had at first appeared to her the very shores of sin, “by the light of such wondrous eyes?” Involuntarily she recalled the words of “Ouida;” “There are no eyes that speak more truly, none on earth that are so beautiful as the eyes of the horse—dark as a gazelle’s, soft as a woman’s, brilliant as stars, a little dreamy and mournful, infinitely caressing when they look at those they love.”

The carriage stopped. They had reached the stables. Instead of awaiting, as usual, the appearance of the trainer, she found that she had alighted and hastily sought the compartment set aside for Cassandra; and, that it was her glossy, silvery little head, that was now swaying so gently within her arms. Memory again reverted to her husband. To the time when his hands fondled the same head, his eyes sparkled at her playful pranks, his lips uttered the word that had named her.

The voice of the trainer suddenly sounding in her ears startled her and she turned rather abruptly toward him.

“She’s improving, ma’am,” he said, after his usual salutation, “with every day. The climate is telling on her, for she leaves a clean trough now after each meal; and her speed—well, no longer than daylight this morning she showed her heels for better’n a quarter to some of the very best ones in the barn, ma’am.”

“But you do not intend to race her, do you?” she exclaimed. “She’s too pretty and to much of a plaything, I should think, for that?”

“True, she is a beauty, ma’am,” replied the trained, “but as for plaything”—he laughed aloud at the thought as he muttered brokenly—“well, if I can get the proper weight on her in that big handicap Saturday, and the track’s right, she might be about the most playful proposition these cracks have yet got up[432] against. And then, there ought to be a good price, too.”

“Oh, but you must not sell her.”

“Sell her! I could have thumped that lawyer for selling her. No, ma’am; I mean there ought to be heavy odds against her in such company.”

“Thomas tells me that Hildreth won yesterday.”

“So she did, ma’am; but at short price, odds on, a favorite you know.”

“Mr. Grannan, though,” he went on, “so his trainer told me, lost pretty heavily on his entry. He said he telegraphed him to place ten thousand on his entry and that he, of course, lost it. Mr. Grannan’s been playing in tough luck all round, so they say.”

At the mention of Grannan’s name the mistress gave a perceptible start, a shudder passed over her, and a moment later, with some stifled remarks she ended the interview, and was moving away in her carriage.

Long after she had retired to her apartments in the home of her aunt, did she hear the words that had escaped the lips of the trainer, sounding within her ears. Grannan had had bad luck! The scene in front of the cathedral was again evolving in her mind. The funeral cortege, the coffin piled high with the floral wreaths. A sudden trepidation seized upon her. She had again dropped the handkerchief. She saw the handsome face of the tall figure beside her bending forward to recover it and then gather the fatal flower.

Could it be that Grannan’s fate—ill fortune, perhaps ruin—had been sealed by the fall of a handkerchief, as many another horseman’s had by the fall of a flag? And that handkerchief dropped by her hand? Could she then be unwittingly instrumental in the downfall which seemed to threaten him? The thought distracted her. She arose from her seat and walked the floor of her room in a fit of petulancy. Her brain teemed with myriad vague and indescribable fancies. The fingers of her hand grew numb, deadened, as though she had but withdrawn them from his parting grasp. She saw the same expression of his face that had touched her, when she had refused his gift. The look of entreaty in his eyes as he turned away.

“Alas!” she at length exclaimed aloud, muttering to herself strangely in her bewilderment. “Alas! alas! for the doctrines of pernicious fatalism. How oft do we entangle ourselves in our own sophisms; and, after all, what poor strugglers we are in the eternal web of destiny. The devils must, indeed, oft laugh out at the fool who has boasted wisdom.”

V

Saturday morning dawned. Dashes of sunlight at length began to dart through the rifts in the lifting clouds. It had rained heavily during the night, and the mistress, though she had ordered out her carriage for a drive to the race course, felt that the condition of the track would, no doubt, preclude the possibility of Cassandra’s start in the handicap. She remembered that the trainer had said, “if the track’s right.” However, she must go. The spell, the fascination that drew her thither seemed irresistible. Her aunt persuaded her to remain for lunch; but one o’clock found her gazing with intensity into the depths of the bewitching eyes, while she tenderly stroked the shapely little head that Cassandra had at sight of her thrust through the doorway of her apartment.

“I was just starting,” said the trainer, who now addressed her, “for a last inspection of the track before deciding what’s best to do. You know, ma’am,” he continued, “this is to be a hard-fought race, and while I believe the little girl”—nodding at Cassandra—“is well conditioned to go the route of a mile and a quarter, and will stand the punishment, still, in heavy going the chances are all against her. There’s Helen Orland,” he went on, “and Empress and Annabel—the track to-day, ma’am’s to their liking.”

The trainer paused, for he could not help but note unmistakable traces of disappointment on the face of the mistress.

Indeed, nothing could have more delighted her now than merely the appearance of her “little pet” upon the track, if only to receive the words of praise from the spectators she felt sure she would. But, as it was a matter to be left entirely with the trainer, she now turned towards him, and handed him a roll of bills from her purse, saying as she did so: “You are[433] doubtless in need of money for expenses. I shall send Thomas to you for your final decision.” So saying, she stepped into her carriage, which moved off in the direction of the clubhouse.

“Gad!” said the trainer. “Five thousand dollars! This reminds me of old times, when the master was living. Only when he gave me a roll like this it was with instructions to keep my eyes on ‘Bookies,’ and make them keep their odds right.”

The crowd had now commenced to flow into the grounds in droves and bunches. As the mistress, calm and collected, swept down the top balcony of the clubhouse to a position that commanded a full view of the course, admiring glances from every direction followed after her. Unattended as she was, and with manner of complete reserve and composure, she seemed wholly absorbed with her own thoughts.

Seated in a group just to her left, and but a few feet in front of her was Colonel Townsend, an old gentleman, with Major Campbell and two others—evidently horsemen, all earnestly engaged in a discussion of horses and races in general.

As she sat listening—as she was compelled to do—to some of the loud-spoken utterances of the group, she surveyed with interest the crowd below her, which was now growing larger and larger. She chanced to observe a man and a boy walking slowly along the track over in front of the stables.

Adjusting her field glasses she saw that it was her trainer and jockey. They appeared to be examining the track carefully, while the trainer pointed to a spot along the outside rail. They then disappeared. As they were leaving the track she could see the trainer shaking his head slowly, with his eyes bent upon the ground.

The pang of disappointment now rankled within her. She knew that Cassandra’s start had been discussed and that it was abandoned. She had never realized till now how thoroughly expectant she had been. Her thoughts took on the coloring of her insatiate longing with which she battled. Her mind passed in review all the struggles, all the regrets, all the vague fancies it had conjured when coupled with the bare name Cassandra.

“Yet,” thought she, “my husband named her. She was his favorite. Why shouldn’t she be mine? I could not help my attachment. Besides, I’m sure it must have grown strong—as it has—on his account. How I had wished to see her start, wished to hear her beauty praised by others!”

The band in the amphitheatre now struck up a lively air and the horses entered for the first race passed for review before the judges preparatory to going to the post. A stranger, who came pressing his way along the balcony until he had joined the group with Major Campbell, seated himself and looked intently at a programme he carried in his hand.

“Major,” he asked, “what entry is this in the handicap that I hear them call ‘the ghost’?”

“Oh,” replied the Major, “that is the little mare ‘Cassandra.’”

At the mention of the name the mistress inclined her ear instantly. “That’s singular,” continued the stranger. “What’s the significance, Major—or do you know?”

“Why, that’s the name the boys here at the track gave to her and by which she is now generally known. You see,” he continued, “her owner, who was greatly attached to her as a mere weanling, is now dead. Have you never seen her, sir?”

The stranger shook his head.

“Well, she’s a little marvel of beauty, sir, a perfect dream; milk-white from tip to tip and as trim and shapely as a gazelle.”

“Does she start this evening?” inquired the stranger.

“Townsend told me but a while ago that he had just heard she would not start.”

“I’m sorry,” replied the stranger, “but after your description of her, Major, I think I shall make a special trip to the stable to see her.”

“You knew her owner, did you not?” asked the major.

“I can’t recall him,” said the stranger, thoughtfully.

“Why, he’s been with us often—a jolly[434] good fellow he was, too, full of life and—”

“Was he married?” interrupted the stranger.

“No—that is, I think not,” said the Major, “for I heard something once to the effect that he was much in love with Judge Taggart’s daughter. By the way,” he continued, “that young lady is, I believe, married now.”

“Yes,” replied the stranger. “I knew her—Miss Cassie.”

“They’re off!” came the shout from the crowd below, and instantly there was a general careening of necks from the balcony. A minute later and the crowd below surged toward the railing of the track and gathered about the judges’ stand, as the horses rushed toward the wire.

Then there was a wild commotion, followed later by a general movement in the direction of the “board pencilers.”

Thus the evening passed on, race by race, with a repetition of the usual scenes and events, until at last there sounded the bugle call for the handicap.

There was a distinct bustle and stir now among the expectant throng, which said plainly that the race of the evening was about to come off.

“Colonel Townsend,” asked the Major, “have you seen Grannan since his arrival to-day?”

“Yes,” responded the Colonel. “I had a short talk with him this morning. I’m sorry for Grannan,” he continued, “he has been singularly unlucky of late, and he says there seems to be no end of it.”

At the mention of the name of Grannan the mistress leaned over and listened. She had long been sitting motionless, stolid, oblivious to everything save her thoughts. Some one touched her upon the arm, and turning sharply, with a startled look in her face, she beheld the outstretched hand of Thomas, holding a batch of tickets.

“The trainer said, ma’am, to tell you that he just could not help it, ma’am; when he saw twenty to one posted against Cassandra’s chances, he made the ‘pencilers’ rub it off, and here, ma’am are the tickets. Mr. Grannan, he said, had placed a large sum on the Empress,” continued Thomas, “and that he took the liberty to purchase pools on Cassandra at the tempting odds.”

She clutched the tickets nervously in her hand and quickly thrust them into her purse, trembling visibly as she did so.

“Ah,” said Colonel Townsend, “we were speaking of Grannan. There is his mare now—Empress—out for the handicap. I think, though,” he continued, “that Helen Orland—Briggs’ mare—is going to have decidedly the best of it in the going to-day.”

“Well,” said the Major, “I like Rosalind or Houston’s entry—Geraldine.”

“What’s the matter with Annabel?” chimed in the stranger. “There she is now. She certainly looks a winner, and the distance just suits her.”

A wild cheer now suddenly burst from the crowd as Helen Orland passed in front of the judges’ stand. She was evidently a favorite with the spectators, for the cheer was repeated.

“Ho! ho!” shouted the Major. “She is going to start. There comes the ‘little ghost.’”

And simultaneously with his words, a bevy of swipes and stable boys set up a yell.

“Mother of Moses!” ejaculated the stranger. “Major, but you were right. She is a dream.”

“Yes, and a beautiful dream at that,” added the Major.

“Evidently she’s no nightmare,” echoed a shrill voice from the crowd.

Poor little Cassandra! She was prancing to the music of the band as proudly as a queen, tossing her dainty head from side to side as gamely and defiantly as a sparrow.

The mistress turned with a look, intense in its anxiety, to Thomas, who was still standing, and thrusting her purse into his hand instructed him to hurry with it to Mr. Grannan, tell him what the trainer had done and say to him that as he was Cassandra’s rightful owner she desired him to do as he wished with purse and contents.

Then lifting her glasses to her eyes with trembling hands, she scanned eagerly the horses as they gathered at the post. Soon, from sheer trembling and weakness, her hands dropped into her[435] lap. Now, for the first time, she beheld Grannan with his back turned toward the track and searching with an anxious gaze the balcony upon which she was seated.

He raised his glasses to his eyes and began slowly to sweep the crowd. As he did this her head sank involuntarily upon her breast. The blood rushed to her face. She was abashed—painfully so. What had she done? Could she stop Thomas? Would that she had seen him before she had sent Thomas. Yet he had placed a large sum on Empress. Thomas had said so. What if he should lose? The thought chilled her. She shuddered violently. He has already lost heavily. It may ruin him.

“They’re off!” roared the throng, and then came the portentous silence. She raised her eyes and saw the form of Grannan now facing with earnest gaze the approaching horses. On they came, as if some terror-inspiring object had suddenly stampeded them.

“Rosalind a neck, Lucinda a length, Helen Orland a head,” commenced the song of the “caller,” from below.

Another moment and they were sweeping past the judges’ stand.

The stranger, with a manifest anxiety in the tone of his voice, now observed that Annabel was lapped on Helen Orland and that Empress had moved up well to the front. Lucinda, he said, had fallen back.

“The ‘little ghost,’” said the Major eagerly, “keeps well up to the bunch, but she’s too small, though, too small.”

Around the turn they whirled, till now the “caller” cried out: “At the half; Rosalind, a neck; Empress, half length; Annabel, a length; Helen Orland—”

“Rosalind, it seems,” exclaimed the Major, “can’t shake them off. See, she’s falling back. Empress leads now and both Helen Orland and Annabel are coming up on her.”

“Look at the ‘little ghost,’” screamed a voice from the crowd as they were rounding into the stretch.

“Ah, but she’s swerved,” chimed in the stranger, “clear to the rail—too bad, too bad; she’s out of it now; but see the Empress, how determined she is. The fight is on now and Annabel and Helen Orland are running as a team. Look! they’re at her throat on either side.”

“Into the stretch: Empress a head; Annabel, a head; Helen Orland—”

“The Empress will win, sure!” said the Colonel.

“Hold!” shouted the stranger. “Look at that! Look at that! They’ve bumped into her. She’s off her stride.”

“Annabel wins easy!” now shouted a chorus of voices from below.

“But here! here! Look at the rail—at the rail!” yelled the stranger, as the crowd below took up the shout and roared: “The Ghost! The Ghost wins!” “No, it’s Annabel, Annabel!” shouted others, “it’s Annabel!”

And thus they flashed under the wire. The crowd now surged around the judges’ stand. A living stream poured out from the amphitheater. Hideous screams and yells rent the very air: “The Ghost!” “Annabel!” “Annabel!” “The Ghost!” “Annabel!” “Cassandra!” “Annabel!” while burning eyes strained, eager to catch the number—No. 7. Cassandra had won.

One long, shrill, deafening shriek now pierced the air, then died away, amidst a rudely descending shower of hats, parasols, and umbrellas. A mad rush for the “bookies,” and the race was ended.

The mistress still stood peering from the balcony as if paralyzed. Her eyes, now fixed, stared from features as pale and immovable as if wrought by the hand of a sculptor. Thomas stood tapping nervously upon the sleeve of her dress, while his ungovernable heels played a tattoo upon the sounding floor. He was unheeded. He ventured a more violent tug, and the shapely figure swung slowly around as though poised on a pivot. “Cassandra’s won, ma’am!”

Her lips moved, but the words were inaudible. Her eyes turned again, bent in the direction of the judges’ stand.

“Have the judges said so, Thomas?”

“Her number’s 7, ma’am,” and pointing to where the number hung, he said: “There’s the number. And here, ma’am,” he continued, gesturing wildly, “are the tickets. I couldn’t find Mr. Grannan, ma’am, and didn’t know what to do, so I lit in and pretty nigh backed Miss Cassie[436] off them boards like I ’lowed Mr. Grannan would have done.”

“We’ll go there at once—to the stables,” said the mistress.

“I’ll fetch the carriage to the side entrance, here, ma’am, if you wish.”

She nodded assent as he hurried away. A familiar voice now caused her to look up into the face of Grannan.

“I must congratulate you,” he said, as he took her hand, “upon the victory of little Cassandra, though I must say I never knew her by that name until now. I was utterly amazed,” he continued, “when I thought I had recognized her. How delighted I am now to know that she won.”

“I am just going to see Cassandra now; will you go with me?” asked the mistress.

A little later, when they were driving in the direction of the stables, she turned to him and said: “I was awfully sorry it had been decided to start Cassandra, when my coachman told me that you had an entry in the race. Did she in any way hinder your chances for success?”

“In no way whatever, I can assure you.”

“Did you lose very heavily on Empress?”

“Oh, nothing that I could say would so much exceed my usual losses of late.”

“Have you ever thought,” she asked, “of the flower that fell from the bier which you persisted in fastening to the lapel of your coat?”

“Am I to be forever doomed, then, for that one perverse act?” he exclaimed.

“Oh, I don’t know. I believe, though, there is an old adage which they say affords some consolation to those who recount their losses.”

“And, pray, what is the adage?”

“Let me see—I think it runs something like this: ‘Unlucky in sport, lucky in l—’”

The word died upon her lips. It was smothered by a kiss.

There was a low whinny near the window of the carriage now as it stopped, and little Cassandra was peering eagerly in, from beneath her gray blanket. The boy led her closer to the window; and, as the mistress clasped her head in her arms, Grannan clasped the mistress in his.

Editor Trotwood’s:

In reading your very interesting and instructive “History of the Hals” and your learned dissertation on the difference between the trot and the pace, I am reminded of one of the most laughable and richest races I ever saw, and which has never been in print before. Understand that thirty-three years ago, when this true story happened, we did not know as much about the difference between the trot and the pace as we do to-day, and which was so ably illustrated in your preceding chapters. Very well—now, for the place: An Illinois town near the Indiana line.

Abe Stickney and Bob Langdon, living in adjoining towns, were rival dealers in road and track horses in a small way. Some time before my story opens Langdon, by a little shrewd, and, perhaps, not quite fair dealing, “singed” Abe for a couple of hundred, and the latter was “laying for him,” as the saying goes. Abe was “game,” and never had uttered a word of complaint, but had kept up a “deal of thinkin’.” In other words, to use one from “The Bishop of Cottontown,” he “froze.”

He was over in Indiana one day, and at a county fair saw a horse of the Blue Bull family, called Hoosier Boy.

In order that your readers may better understand and appreciate this narrative (for I am sure you know the peculiarities of the Blue Bulls), I will explain that the Blue Bull family of horses originated in Indiana, that little was known of the ancestors of the founder of the family, Blue Bell No. 75, that the name[437] was a combination derived from his peculiar color, and a nickname bestowed on him by his enemies, who called him “Prudens Bull,” but he turned out like the “Ugly Duckling,” and surprised his friends and shamed his enemies by founding a remarkable family, and at one time, since I can well remember, he was the champion sire of 2:30 speed, some sixty in number. They were nearly all natural pacers, but as pacers were not popular those days, they were made to trot by the use of heavy toe-weights.

The horse that Abe saw was taking his morning exercise and was a nice, smooth-gaited pacer. In the afternoon, to his astonishment, he saw the same horse win a trotting race in pretty good time. Abe investigated the matter at once and found that he could buy the horse very reasonably, as he was not quite sound, and he also learned that not a step would he trot without toe-weights, but would pace quite fast, though not nearly as fast as he could trot. The horse was shipped home with a bunch of others he had bought, and Abe immediately began to lay his plans. He hired a fellow that he could trust and sent him out to the fair grounds with his horse and then proceeded to Langdon’s town and communicated to Bob’s friends that he had a horse that could beat anything in the county. That was enough, and Bob was looking for Abe and he did not have any trouble to find him.

“They tell me you have a regular streak o’ greased lightning, Abe?”

“Who in thunder’s been lying to you, Bob. Ain’t got nothing but a cheap one, but I would bet ten on a little race between Hoozier Boy and Gray Dan just for fun, might make it twenty the day of race if my horse is all right.”

The ten was soon posted, and the day set a week later, as Abe was on his way to Chicago to be gone a week.

Soon after, Langdon, knowing that Abe was away, sent a couple of friends over to learn all they could about Hoosier Boy. They found the horse in charge of a very sociable fellow.

Yes, that horse was a pacer, and he “lowed” he could step some. He was going to train him a little and they could see him step if they would stay.

So out came Hoosier Boy, and they saw him work a mile, and there was no mistake.

Abe’s man certainly was busy for his orders were that there might be a buyer there while he was gone, and to show him the very best mile he could.

Bob’s friends timed him very carefully, and went home delighted. Gray Dan could beat that time by eight seconds or more. That man of Abe’s was so obliging, too, and they gave him a nice tip, and asked him as a special favor not to mention their visit, as they wanted to buy the horse as cheap as possible.

The race day came and found Abe gloriously drunk. ’Twas not a common thing, but it seemed to always happen when there was important business on hand.

“I ain’t got much money,” said Abe, “but, by gol, I’ll bet that lower eighty of mine agin a thousand dollars—never did like that farm—lost the best cow I ever owned in that pesky swamp.”

Abe had plenty of friends, and they gathered round trying every way to prevent his losing that farm. They knew him for a man that never whimpered when he lost his money, and Bob Langdon was a “sharper.”

“Skin ye, sure, Abe,” they said. But Abe turned a deaf ear to their entreaties.

“I’m runnin’ my own business. ’G’lang’ away and let me be.” And the money was soon up, and the farm, too, and they repaired to the fair grounds for the race. When they arrived they found that very “accommodating fellow” getting Hoosier Boy ready for the race. A good-sized chunk of lead adorned the toes of his front feet, but as Bob and his friends never noticed it, and even if they had would never have minded it, since the greatest of pacers often wear toe-weights, they only nudged each other and prepared to soak it to poor Abe the harder.

As usual, Abe was drunk—or appeared so—and, much to the disgust of his friends, staggered around trying to get up more bets on Hoosier Boy. Then his friends begged, expostulated. They even threatened to take him home forcefully and declare the race off because one of the parties was too drunk to have justice done him. But Abe dodged them[438] and claimed police protection from the crowd who were backing Gray Dan and preparing to rob him on a dead certainty.

Finally, they sent for Abe’s wife to come and save her husband’s “lower eighty.” But the good lady only told them to attend to their own business, and that Abe never was as drunk as he seemed, and while they were gone Abe managed to borrow a thousand more by giving a bill of sale, if he lost, on Hoosier Boy and twenty head of steers he had! Then, to their disgust, he did more—he put up his homestead against another thousand on the ground that he wanted to lose it, because his mother-in-law always stayed there. As this was all in the world he had—the eighty acres, the steers and the horse, and the homestead—and the Gray Dan crowd could find no one else who would put up at any odds, they called for the race and sat down to enjoy the fun.

The horses came out and scored for the race, and still the Gray Dan crowd suspected nothing. It was dead easy. Hadn’t they seen Hoosier Boy do his best, and paced in 2:24, and couldn’t Gray Dan pace in 2:16 or better?

“Po’r Abe,” said all of Abe’s friends, as they got behind fences and posts to keep from seeing the robbery.

On the second score they got away—at least, Hoosier Boy did—so far away from Gray Dan that he was at the half before the Gray Dan crowd saw that he was not pacing at all, but trotting to beat the band.

He finished the mile in 2:13. They forgot to time Gray Dan, who was so far behind.

Bob and his crowd fell off their perch in disgust and left their money with the stake-holder. Abe still owns the lower eighty, and sundry citizens of that locality have resolved that whenever they bet again how fast a horse can go, they will stipulate whether it be trot or pace.

M. R. HIGBEE.

The Truth About Horseshoeing.

Editor Trotwood’s:

In a foot-note to my article in your February number, you said, “We will gladly publish your ideas on horseshoeing,” thus letting the bars down, knowing, perhaps, that I would be liable to wander in.

If I could turn backward in my career twenty or thirty years, I would undertake the task with more confidence in my ability to furnish something worthy of a place in your columns. I was young in the business then. I had finished my apprenticeship, and felt sure that the few things I did not know relative to the farrier’s art were not worth considering. Since then, I have been a regular attendant in the great free school of experience, taught by that merciless teacher, Necessity, and while I have been fairly successful in trying to furnish unnatural protection to that part of the horse which comes in contact with the earth, I am still in need of the necessary amount of conceit that would enable me to pose as a teacher.

I trust you will allow me to ramble around back and forth between the horseshoer and the horse-owner (one as much to blame as the other when the “family pet” goes lame), and I feel confident of being able to benefit some one, or his poor old overfed horse.

To the uninitiated who read the average writer’s suggestions on horseshoeing, it would appear that there is no other mechanical operation so difficult as that of attaching a shield of metal to the hoof of a horse. That is an erroneous opinion.

I was once told by an old English shoer that “the man who picked up a horse’s foot that had never worn a shoe, gave it a brush or two with a rasp and then nailed on a light piece of iron (an old, half-worn shoe, perhaps) would do a better job of shoeing than nine-tenths of the so-called fancy jobs.” I often think of my old English friend, who spent five, perhaps seven years, as an apprentice trying to master the trade. How different here in free America, and in these catch-as-catch-can times. It is not a rare thing to find men who are proprietors of shoeing shops, whose apprenticeship consisted of six months or a year’s service as a helper, and the vast army of horses to be shod is owned and controlled by people who are very much in a hurry, and who[439] give little or no attention to the care of horses’ feet.

So the “family pet,” as Trotwood has called him, goes lame. He is taken to the shoeing shop in the belief that the shoer can relieve him. Now, this shoer is a human being, flesh and blood like other men, and it is extremely difficult for horseshoers to be strictly honest. (I speak from experience.) The fact is, he wants to tell the owner that his horse is too highly fed for the amount of exercise he is getting. He would like to tell him that high calks and dry stalls are slowly, but surely, drawing his hoofs together, causing a lateral pressure of the wall on the more sensitive internal parts, and he thinks of many other things that point to the duty of the care-taker. But I have found that, usually, that kind of talk don’t suit my customers. It puts too much of the responsibility on them, so the shoer begins at once to look wise. The horseshoer who knows how to look wise is an artist, born to succeed. Placing his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, he begins a tirade of abuse on the man who last shod the horse, after this fashion: “Well, I should think he would be lame. Any man that don’t know better than to put a pair of cook stoves like those on a horse’s foot,” etc., etc. After he has removed the “cook stoves” he proceeds to shoe the horse in his own unapproachable way polishes the shoes, rasps the hoofs carefully and, perhaps, saturates the bottoms with oil of tar. He pays the price demanded, takes the horse home and, when his lameness grows worse instead of better, he comes to the conclusion that he has been “buncoed.”

A few days ago a grocer’s horse with thick-walled hoofs was brought to us, shod with heavy shoes and high calks, hoofs badly contracted, and dead lame. I promised that if given my own way, I would cure him. We shortened the hoofs, put on a pair of “tips”—just a little patch of iron on each toe, letting the frog, or what remained of it, down on the ground. In less than ten days the lameness ceased though he had been lame for many months. In winter when it is necessary to shoe him with calks again, he occasionally shows a little lameness, but when spring comes we go back to the “tips” and the trouble vanishes. The owner of this horse thinks we performed a miracle, but we did nothing of the kind, we omitted the fancy rasping, the oil of tar, and the wise look in this case, and just kept close to nature.

In the days of the old horse cars in the cities I have stood on the boulder-covered streets of Chicago and watched the car horses, to see how they were shod. Imagine my surprise when I found hundreds of them shod in front, with shoes similar to those we used on the grocer’s horse.

When we mortals, who flatter ourselves that we are fashioned after God’s own image, drift too far from nature’s prescribed course, we soon discover the folly of our actions. If we don’t, the undertaker, for a cash consideration backs up to the front door of our house with a profusely tasseled hearse and starts us on our journey toward the head waters of Salt river. Meanwhile, the horse goes on, pounding away on the stony pikes, which, long ago, were substituted for the old bridle paths and the turf-covered highways, so we resort to metal protection for the hoof.

I have always looked upon horseshoeing, as practiced in many shops, as a necessary evil, on a par with the taking into the human system of vile physics and rank lotions, and when both owner and shoer are equally ignorant or careless, what must the consequences be?

A number of years ago, a man came to me for advice as to how his family horse should be shod. I ventured a suggestion and he brought the horse in. This was early in September. We shod him all round, doing what we called a first-class job. I advised that the shoes should be reset in about six weeks. He went away seemingly much pleased, and his joy lasted all winter.

On the 28th of March he came back with the shoes all on just as we left them. A few things went through my mind which I thought best not to make known to my customer. We reset the shoes and I never saw him afterwards. That was about sixteen years ago, and I presume that when the shoes need resetting again he will bring the horse to have us look after him.

[440]

Just one more: I once shod a banker’s horse all round, early in May. As he took the horse from the shop he said his reason for having him shod was on account of turning him out to pasture. Shades of Pegasus, think of that! During the summer he sold the horse and in November he was brought to us to be “sharpened up” for the winter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not a shoe had been removed since we put them on early in May.

I relate these two instances to show that there are difficulties in the handling of horses’ feet over which the shoer has no control, and which frequently put him in a frame of mind so that he concludes to abandon the idea of painstaking, and resolves to be less particular about his work.

While roaming around in this broad, busy country of ours, I have drifted into many shoeing shops, and have worked in not a few of them. The greatest fault I find with my fellow craftsmen is their universal tendency toward overdoing. In their zeal to excel the other fellow they resort to “fads” and adopt unnecessary methods, many of which are decidedly injurious to the horse, and you who have horses to be shod should insist that you prefer a plain, careful job, minus the whittling, polishing, rasping, etc., and the shoer, in these days of close competition, will be only too glad to obey orders.

But how shall the owner know what is best for his horse? He is a butcher, a baker or perhaps he is the time-honored “candlestick maker,” and is as busy as any of us in this mad rush of to-day, from which there seems to be no escape. So, really, I don’t believe he ever will give much attention to his faithful horse’s feet, and between unscrupulous horseshoers and third-grade veterinary surgeons, “poor old Dobbin” will continue to be, as he has been in the past, the victim of his master’s misplaced confidence. What does the average man know about the needs and requirements of his own body? He has been called “a bundle of habits,” and from what I can observe, he is about ready to draw a good salary as the star performer in “a comedy of errors.” But in spite of stumbling blocks, and millstones around our necks, out of the rank and file of common men there comes occasionally, an Edison, a Horace Greeley, a Mark Twain or one like your own Major Thomas, whose portrait adorns the frontispiece of your March number. From the same source comes an occasional good, honest, painstaking horseshoer, whose sole ambition is not for the dollars he may lay up. He is one whom “goodness and mercy will follow, all the days of his life”—one who knows the importance of his calling and who realizes that a reputation for sobriety and honesty, coupled with natural ability and acquired skill, will bring to him the reward he is seeking.

I have written enough for this time, and what have I said in the above preamble that will enlighten the reader who really is trying to post himself on the care of the horse’s foot and the proper method of shoeing it? He does not desire to become a student of anatomy, and I know from experience that the advice of an humble knight of the anvil would not be taken seriously by the majority of horse owners.

But I have in my library two small volumes on shoeing, and the care of the hoof, which to me are worth their weight in gold. The first is “Practical Horseshoeing,” by T. Fleming, President of the Central Veterinary Surgeons’ Medical Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, published by D. Appleton Co., New York. No honest man, who knows whereof he speaks, can even criticise this work.

The other is “Pathological Horseshoeing,” by Joseph B. Coleman, V. S., which goes a little farther into diseases of the foot and their treatment.

Get these two little books, brother horse owner, and when the good horse goes lame, bump your head against the side of his stall and think. They will help you to see how far you are keeping from nature’s ways. Consider that your horse is made of tissue and nerves, almost as delicate as your own; that he is entirely at your mercy and unlike the “Devil Wagon,” he cannot be patched up with files, monkey-wrenches and cement.

LA FORGE.

Pecatonica, Ill.

[441]

TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.

TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn. Office 150 Fourth Ave., North.

JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE,
Editor-in-Chief.

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: One Year, $1.00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
Advertising Rates on application.

NASHVILLE, TENN., May, 1906.

Human Registration.

Mr. Thos. J. Moore, of Moore’s, S. C., writes: “Have you your family genealogy? You seem to be up on horse pedigree. I’d like to have it, if not too much trouble.”

Alas and alack! but that is the trouble with most of us. We pedigree our horses and dogs, but we throw off terribly on our sons and daughters. Any old pedigree seems good enough for them. In the language of the Bible, “Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” What a Book it is! “For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.” There is authority for a pedigreed man. And the Book itself—chapters are given to the pedigree of one man. The Bible loves a good pedigree. It is a great registration Book of the Jews. Did you ever see Moses’ pedigree tabulated—Moses, the greatest man in the Bible except One? It tells a wonderful story. He was the most inbred man that ever lived. And so was the mother of the Christ. These things will do to study and think about.

As for me, I am constrained to say that the quiet study of the pedigree of horses has taught me much. I have picked up a few of the great lessons of cause and effect in studying the lower animal that should apply to the higher one. That is the only way. Darwin reached the laws of his evolution by beginning with the lowest form of life.

I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. The white man who brands his unborn child a mongrel deserves death at the hands of the rest of his race. Death, because, like the murderer, he is pulling down society. The murderer takes what he cannot restore. But this man does worse—he chains his own child for life to a dead body.

It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars. The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most.

What a pity all the world does not go into the horse business and study the effects of heredity long enough to learn a little common sense about the breeding of that highest of animals—man! What a pity they cannot get off their little bicycles long enough to get the hump out of their backs and the wheels out of their heads, and learn that like, in man or horse, poet or donkey, produces[442] like or the likeness of an ancestor! Will people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft? Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are born? Ye gods, and is it from this that immortality is made?

Some day, for the benefit of humanity, I propose to open a Registration Book. I want to do this because I want to see people take as much interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man “falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure, marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk her poodle dog behind.

And here is the way I would go to registering my people. In all registration there must first be a foundation stock. I would let truthfulness, honesty and work count as “foundation stock.” This would change the present standard radically, and let into life a foundation of good blood that at present is entirely neglected and not allowed to come in at all unless it happens to come in under a dress suit. I would then let accomplishments—the ability to do—from the ability to do poetry to the ability to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—count as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out old humanity and proceed to breed a race of people fit to live.

Here it is:

[443]

Old Wash’s Ma.

Editor Trotwood’s:

Your writings as they appeared in the Horse Review always appealed to me, especially the “Old Wash” stories, and I remember some years ago that some one was impertinent enough to ask the age of Old Wash. Of course, that fellow wasn’t entitled to an answer, but as I have run across a clipping of an old negro woman whom I am sure must be old Wash’s mother (I hope you can verify it), I want him to look her up. The fact that he felt young enough to marry (the unlucky thirteenth) it might interest him to be able to tell his troubles to his ma.

Your magazine is a welcome monthly visitor, and may it always come up to the standard you have planned for it is my earnest wish. Here is the story:

Barnum, the great showman, hearing of an old negro woman down in Tennessee who claimed to be 125 years old, called to see her with a view to securing her for a side show. He found that the old woman was really very ancient, and commenced to question to find out just how old she really was. He said to her:

“Auntie, do you remember George Washington?”

“I reckon I duz, sah; I’se played wid him many a day.”

“Do you remember anything about the Revolutionary War?” asked Barnum.

“Well, I should say I duz,” replied the old lady. “I ’members when de bullets wuz a flyin’ and a zoonin’ round here laik bumblebees, sah.”

“What do you remember about the fall of the Roman empire?” said Barnum.

The old woman was “stumped” for a moment, but, recovering herself, replied:

“I wuz a mighty leetle gal den’ but I ’members hearin’ de ole folk say dat dey heerd sumpin’ drap.”

E. J. FERGUSON.

Washington, Pa.

LITTLE JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SOUTH—FLORENCE ALABAMA.

It is fitting that the story of the journey to Florence, Ala., should appear In the same issue with Jackson’s march into the Creek Nation; for the story of this pretty little city on the Tennessee, between the foothills of the mountains and the cotton plains beyond, is literally thumb-marked with Old Hickory.

Andrew Jackson knew and understood what was good in woman, in man and in land. In these he never erred. Never in his life did he tie on to a quitter or touch a yellow streak. When he stamped the seal of his friendship on a man or woman, or drove the steel of his compass[1] on land he had decided to buy, they were already registered. And history, a century later, will tell you they were not false.

When a man’s judgment, like his literature, stands the test of a century, it is good for all time.

But before the white man was the Indian, and before the Indian, the Mound Builders. The Mound Builders never were known to settle on poor land. They found Florence before the Indian, before the white man, before the hero of New Orleans.

It is beautiful to speculate about those people. Who they were and what they were only their great, silent mound monuments tell, and they are as dumb as the unreturning past.

The mound they built where the great creek meets the Tennessee is a perfect and splendid specimen of their custom. Scholars say it was built for religious worship—not to bury their dead within, and it is one of a series in the valley of the Tennessee. What robed, mysterious priest and peoples once worshiped around it? What censers of eternal fire burned always on its summit? What white-robed maidens met a sacrificial death on its summit overlooking the river? What warriors thronged around it, chanting their battle songs and dipping their spear points in the victims’ blood?

At the sale of the first lots in Florence in July, 1818, James Madison (who but a few years before had been elected President of the young Republic, and Andrew Jackson, who in a few years more was destined to be another of her Presidents) both bought lots in the new town, then, as now, a goodly, fair site in the bend where the Tennessee, hugging the Southern hills as if to escape the mouth of the foaming, passionate, tumultuous shoals, shrinks away, and, like a beautiful woman when she throws off her mantle in the ball room, exposes shoulders fair to see.

They were fair enough in the wilderness to stop Jackson and Madison. Jackson must have seen the beautiful site for a city on this most beautiful and lordly river often. On his first taste of Indian fighting he crossed it somewhere near Florence, when pioneer Tennesseans struck the Indian marauders who lived at the great Coldwater spring at[445] the present site of Tuscumbia, a few miles beyond. Later his troops crossed it down the old military road he cut out from Nashville to Pensacola, when they marched to New Orleans, to glory or to death. The gap in the mountainous hills near where the graceful bridge of the Louisville & Nashville crosses the river is still pointed out as the spot where the heroes of New Orleans pontooned across from the mouth of the creek. Methinks the old hero never forgot this spot—the great, splendid river, wooded, hill-crowned, plain-girdled and thunder-foamed with the spray from the long-leaping, shining shoals.

He was young when he first saw it. He had made no name and no history. He was only a common, ordinary, hot-blooded, dare-devil, cussin’, fighting Irish boy, lank of form, peaked of face and forehead, with piercing blue eyes, a thin, lofty, religious, idealized, hatchety head, bequeued with bristling, sandy-red hair.

You may think I am foolish to call him religious, but be patient. A man is born religious or not. And if born so, all his wildness and fighting and bloodshed and profanity will not eliminate it. No man had more of it than Jackson. He was naturally religious. Whenever the passions and fightings of his combatitive trend and nature gave him a breathing spell he fell back in every deed and act on the Scotch-Irish predestination of his breeding. Mr. Eaton walked one night into President Jackson’s bed room. He was preparing to retire. The miniature of the dead Rachel Jackson, which he wore next to his heart, with a silk string around his neck, underneath his clothes, lay on the table by her open Bible. He was reading the Bible, with tears in his eyes, and by him he had her picture to help him interpret it.

Some may not think this is religion. But it is religion of the deepest kind.

Florence is full of history, and history that counts.

John Coffee, Jackson’s right-hand general at New Orleans, and who married Rachel Jackson’s niece, was one of the founders of the town, a corporation known as The Cypress Creek Land Company. The old hero lies buried in a nearby hill. A gallant man he was, sturdy and true, and Jackson often said that but for him at New Orleans he knew not what he would have done. Old Hickory said that, but, rely upon it, he would have done something just the same.

Another incorporator was Col. James Jackson, whose old colonial home still stands at the Forks, the original plantation covering several thousand acres of as goodly land as ever felt the pressure[446] of a race horse. For here it was that many famous race horses lived and bred their kind. Col. James Jackson imported Glencoe, a horse, to my mind, greater than any that Old Hickory or any of the Tennesseeans ever imported. Often James Jackson would meet the Tennesseeans in fierce contests of the turf, in the Tennessee valley or at the old Clover Bottom, and the laurels were more often with the Alabamian.

In going through the court records, back to the old books in search of early history of this beautiful town, I find some queer and quaint documents. I did not search closely, but what little I did see convinced me that James Madison must have come very near going broke on Florence. People who are used to booms in these days of cities, railroads, mines, spindles, furnaces and a fast-increasing population don’t know what a pioneer boom really was. Here in the heart of a wilderness a roadless territory, the land still flecked with the blood of the white and the red, the nearest town a village on the Cumberland, one hundred and fifty miles away, and only a few settlers along the bluffs of the river, with savage Indians lurking in the interior—no peoples, no cities, no industries—nothing but a yoke of oxen and a wilderness of uncleared land upon which to base coupons for the future—here was a boom to make one smile.

The lots were untouched forests jutting out on an Indian trail to the river. And yet the one on which the present bank stands fetched over $3,000, and the one just below the courthouse and diagonally across fetched $1,840! Here is faith for you—here is booming that booms. If such men as Jackson and Madison pinned their faith there like that, in July, 1818, what splendid opportunities now offer themselves for faith in a town which, as one stands on the hillside looking down on the same great river, sees it covered with a cloud, not from the sky, but from earth—from furnace and factory, and behold, the valley of erstwhile woods, the busy mart of men in homes and houses. And two great railroads—the Louisville & Nashville and the Southern—and one great river, to keep freight down.

The total sale of the first two or three hundred lots was $233,580. Andrew Jackson bought lot 6 for $350; Nos. 57 to 62, for $250 to $400. Madison bought lot No. 28 for $300; 39 for $390; 41 to 44, $400 to $600.

Madison made his first payments, and then—let them all go for taxes! Evidently the great expounder of the Constitution and President of the United States took his first lesson in boom towns when Fate sent him to the Tennessee River to close up an Indian treaty.

And he must have been easy. Oh, if the real estate agents of to-day could always meet his kidney!

Further tracing of old records shows that he caught it all around. November 1st, 1826, I find that James Madison appointed one Dabney Morris his agent to handle “all his lands in Alabama, all lots in Florence, also eight shares of stock in Cypress Land Company.” On August 22, 1826, is an agreement in which James Madison extends the time of payment of a judgment he held against one Bedford amounting to $4,680.96. And, worst of all, Dabney Morris laid down on him, for later a record shows that Morris’ notes to Madison went to protest, to satisfy which the said Morris turned over land to said Madison to the tune of $24,866—a small fortune in those days (in money, not in land) when money was worth nearly double what it now is. In the slang language of to-day, they evidently “did enough to Jimmy.”

But Old Hickory paid for his. It is not recorded that he lost a cent. Old Hickory was born holding on. He never turned loose.

And to show what things cost in those days: On October 20, 1819, Thomas Childress and W. W. Warner, who had been appointed to sell the effects and settle up the estate of a deceased pioneer, report the sale of the following: Twelve negro slaves, $4,200; five head of horses, $225 ($45 each—ye gods! Evidently they were not Hals); twenty-three head of cattle, $165 (that was before the beef trust); twenty-nine head of hogs, $86.50; five beds and furniture, $100; two spinning wheels, $2; two rifle guns, $22; ‘one pare saddle bags,’ $1; and five ‘setting chairs,’ $2.50 (‘setting chairs’—this was evidently[447] the beginning of the incubator idea). Just below it John W. Byrne sells a nineteen-year-old negro to James Hickman for $460, whom he guarantees to be “sound, healthy, clear of any disorder whatever.” And land sales—some of it fetched fifty dollars per acre. That was before it was cleared, too.

It can now be bought for $10 to $25 an acre, and will raise two crops in one year!

If there was any faith for their belief nearly a century ago, what a chance now for the man who invests in Florence or in Lauderdale land!

Some months ago I found a rare old book which has afforded me a great deal of pleasure as well as information. It is called “Letters from Alabama,” by Anne Royal, whom it seems was a most eccentric old woman, afflicted with a mania for writing down everything she saw or heard (and remarkably well she did it) on a trip by stage and horseback which she made for the purpose of seeing the new country. She left Washington November, 1817, and reached Melton’s Bluff, on the Tennessee River, about New Year. Her description of men and things in the new country is the most interesting I have ever read, and the most accurate. As Melton’s Bluff, as she called the place, is not far from Florence (I think it was afterwards called Marathon), I will give some of her descriptions of the new country as it looked then, six months before Florence was laid out into town lots:

“You have heard that this country consists of table and bottom land, also of the bluffs. These bluffs happen where there is no bottom land, but the tableland running up to the river forms a high precipice, called a bluff. This is the case at Melton’s Bluff, the highest I have seen. Here is a very large plantation of cotton and maize, worked by about sixty slaves, owned by General Jackson, who bought the interests of old Melton.

“No language can convey an idea of the beauties of Melton’s Bluff. It is said to be the handsomest spot in the world, off the seaboard, and rich as it is beautiful. I can sit in my room and see the whole plantation; the boats gilding down the river, and the opposite shore, one mile distant. The ducks, geese and swan, playing at the same time on the bosom of the stream, with a full view of the many islands. It is, after all, the great height of the site that pleases.

“I took a walk with some ladies to-day over the plantation, as we wished to have a nearer view of those snowy fields which so sedulously present themselves to our view, together with orchards, gin houses, gardens, Melton’s mansion, and a considerable negro town.

“We approached the mansion by a broad street running up the river bank east of the town. This street seems suspended between heaven and earth, as the whole premises for two miles, all in sight, appears to be elevated above the horizon, and none above the rest. We entered the courtyard, fronting the house, by a stile; and the first thing we met was a large scaffold overspread with cotton; as it was in the seed, there must have been many thousand pounds. Being damp from dew, and often rain, it must be dried in this manner. The mansion was large, built with logs, shingled roof, and may have been built twenty-five or thirty years since. I recoiled at the sight of a place once the habitation of such a monster as Melton was. Some of our party went in: I did not. General Jackson’s overseer, who joined us here, said he lived in the lower story, the upper being filled with cotton. This scaffold was about four feet from the ground. From this we crossed another fence, and found ourselves in a cotton field of about one hundred acres, white with cotton and alive with negroes. The center of this field is said to be the rallying point of viewing the scenery, as it doubtless is. You can see up to Brown’s Ferry, eight miles distant, with the naked eye, and the same distance down.

“The term ‘beauty’ is applied to anything which excites pleasant feelings. Beauty is said to be a uniformity amidst variety, a proportion of parts adapted to a whole, fitness of things to an end, quantity and simplicity. All this is realized on Melton’s Bluff. Here is a noble river which combines in itself all you can conceive of grandeur and utility,[448] adorned with islands, spangled with boats, and enlivened with wild flowers. Lift your eye from the river, and lo! magnificent fields, white as snow, orchards, farms and houses all in view, without moving out of the spot. You may thus form some idea of this far-famed bluff. Here the green islands look like floating meadows. Here the boatman wields his mossy oar and guides his freighted boat along. Here the wild fowl arrayed in glossy plumes, wantons as she lists. Here the distant billows breaking o’er the shoals, echo back in murmuring sounds, and mingling sweetly with the music of the boatman’s viol, swells upon the ear and softly dies away upon the breeze. To crown the whole, here the majestic swan, robed in dazzling white, moves in all her graceful attitudes. These are beauties which may be felt but cannot be described. This combination of objects, each beautiful in itself, and so materially useful, constitutes the beauty of Melton’s Bluff. All the trade of East Tennessee pass by the Bluff and halt there to take in their pilots.”

Can description be more beautiful? Anne Royal, whoever she was, could write classic English for her day and generation.

From Huntsville, December 25, 1817, she wrote: “The face of this country has changed five times in my tour. From Big Sandy river (the boundary of Kentucky and Virginia) to Mount Sterling, the soil is black, firm, uneven and covered with heavy timber, beech and oak principally. From Mt. Sterling to Danville, called first-rate land, it is generally black as your hat and the growth is locust, cherry and walnut. They continue to the Red river, in Tennessee, one hundred miles. They are not a dead or prairie-like level, but rather waving.

“Next to them comes on the lofty timbered black, rich soil and large grape vines and continues to Nashville. Upon leaving Nashville the red cedar begins and though the land is still rich, it is much interrupted with swamps and stones. This is well watered and continues to Fayetteville, on Elk River, near the southern boundary of the State. There again we have the black loam and heavy timber, till within eighteen miles of Huntsville, when the chocolate lands commence again, like the barrens; though light, it is not destitute of timber. All of these lands extend from the mountains on the left, to the Ohio on the right. We forded all the rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee except Kentucky river. The Kentuckians are the handsomest people, by far, in the United[449] States. They are not very stout men, but have fine features and very beautiful complexions. The Tennesseans are not so stout as the Kentuckians, nor so fair, but they are well shaped and more active. There is a native, bold independence in both, with this difference: the Kentuckians are great brags, whilst the Tennesseans, equally as brave and gallant, are wholly unconscious of their virtues. What astonished me most was their careless indifference on the subject of their late gallant achievement, particularly at New Orleans. They spoke of it with perfect unconcern, and only mentioned it when applied to, and then not half the same interest they would show on the subject of hunting and killing deer. Not so the Kentuckians—they appreciate their bravery to the greatest extent. The Kentucky ladies are very large, but are fair and well featured, and much more polished (excepting the ladies of Nashville) than the ladies of Tennessee; but the latter are better shaped, are very artless and the young women have a sweet simplicity in their looks and countenance. Both men and women are without disguise, nor have they any of that impertinent curiosity common to other States. But the most distinguishing trait of the Tennessean is that he treats all men alike. The nabob, with his splendid equipage, receives no more nor as much attention as the pedestrian. They are extremely jealous of wealthy, or what we call big, men. One of them, as I came on, being asked rather peremptorily by one of the big bugs, to rub down his horse, cursed him and told him to ‘Do it yourself—I am no man’s servant.’

“Last evening I had the pleasure of seeing General Coffee, the renowned soldier and companion of General Jackson. This hero, of whom you have heard so much, is upward of six feet in height, and proportionately wide. Nor did I ever see so fine a figure. He is thirty-five or thirty-six years of age, his face is full, and features handsome. His complexion is ruddy, though sunburned. His hair and eyes black and a soft serenity diffuses his countenance. His hair is carelessly thrown to one side and displays one of the finest foreheads in nature—high, smooth and retreating. His countenance has much animation while speaking and his eye sparkles. I expected to see a stern, haughty, fierce warrior. No such thing. You look in vain for the Indian fighter. He is as cool as a dewdrop, but deep in his soul you see very plain that desperate, firm, cool and manly courage which has covered him with glory. He must be a host when he is aroused. He speaks very slowly and may weigh about 200 weight.”

From Milton’s Bluff (which she says was afterward changed to Marathon), January 18, 1818, she writes: “Good news awaits you. Read on. Having collected a few books in a corner I heard some one say: ‘General Jackson, General Jackson comes,’ and running to my window I saw him walking slowly up the hill between two gentlemen, his aids. He was dressed in a blue frock coat, with epaulettes, a common hat, with a black cockade and a sword by his side. He is very tall and slender. He walked on by our door to Major Wyatt’s, his companion in arms, where he put up for the night, though he called on us that evening and the next morning. His person is finely shaped and his features not handsome, but strikingly bold and determined. He is very easy and affable in his manners, and loves a jest. He told one of our party he ‘was one of the blue hen’s chickens.’ He appears to be about fifty years old. There is a great deal of dignity about him. He related many hardships endured by his men in the army, but never a word of his own. His language is pure and fluent, and he has the appearance of having kept the best company. He has been ordered by the government against the Seminole Indians. His army is on the march considerably ahead of him, having crossed at Ditto’s Landing, up the river, but he came round by this place, to see his plantation and slaves.”

And what of those lands to-day, and what are the inducements they offer to the Northern farmer seeking a home in the South? Meeting a very intelligent and reliable farmer, Mr. W. M. Sammon, who had moved from Dalton, Ill., to Lauderdale country, near Florence, some seven years ago, I interviewed him on[450] this subject, reminding him that Trotwood’s was a medium which would rather under-estimate than over-color the picture; that a people did not take much stock in highly-colored pictures of glorious Edens, finding them to be untrue and as such hurting all concerned. “That is true,” said Mr. Sammon, “and well said. Many hundreds of Northern people are misled by such statements and become disgusted when the real facts are enough to captivate any one wishing to make a home here. To begin with, I sold my land in Illinois at three times what just as good, if not better, land cost me here, with three more months in the year for working it. I found the land just as level as in Illinois, and hence I could use the same tools I had there for corn, wheat, oats and alfalfa. I find red clover grows here just as well as in Illinois, and other grasses we cannot grow there, such, for instance, as Bermuda, which will grow anywhere here and make the finest summer pasture in the world, standing sun and drought when other grasses would die. The land does not produce as much corn per acre as does Illinois. Corn in the South, owing to the longer climate, goes much to stalk and fewer stalks can be planted in the hill, but mine produces from twenty-five to forty bushels on the upland and as high as sixty in richer lowlands. But this is to a great extent offset by the difference in price, selling here all the time at sixty to seventy cents, whereas in the North we do well to get forty cents per bushel. All kinds of live stock I find do better here, for they are not troubled with flies, and hence we have no nets to plough under, nor screens for the house. One of the greatest problems to the farmer in Illinois is help. Last fall a friend of mine came here and told me he had to help his wife wash the clothes every week. I paid $25 and board for my farm help up there, but here I get good help at $8 to $10 and board. As for water, there is no comparison. Up there it was ponds and cisterns, but here is a country of springs. I never saw anything like it. Creeks, too, with beds full of gravel, which make the finest roads in the world. It is the best watered and healthiest country I ever saw. The water here is plentiful and easy of access.

“The greatest crop I have found here to build up the land is peas—the Southern pea. It is equal to clover as a nitrogen producing crop, enriching the land, and as a money-maker it beats anything in the North. I sow peas in my corn every third row and run round it a few times. It is laid by with the corn. I can make ten dollars worth of pork per acre in peas and leave the land better than it was. I can raise all stock cheaper here, even turkeys, on account of the peas and grasshoppers. There are nine months of pasture, year in and year out. The land is not as rich as in Illinois, but I make more, owing to peas. My clover there, I could hardly give away, it selling at $2 to $4 per ton, but here I find ready sale for my pea hay at $12 to $15 per ton, and raise more per acre than clover. Wheat needs some fertilizers here, as the belt is far south, but it produces fairly well. I find good money in raising mules. Pastures are so cheap that they practically cost nothing. I buy western mares, good workers, very cheap, and raise a mule worth $150 that is not housed at all and runs in the pasture or on cane all the year.

“The climate is mild and pleasant. People have a mistaken idea as to the heat. It is not as hot here as there, for the heat is steady, even temperature, and a good breeze in the summer.

“I think I know when I have a good thing, and I am sorry I have not lived here all my life. I have made more money and enjoyed better health, and the people are kind, neighborly and hospitable. They are not after the dollar alone.”

This is the talk of a straightforward, practical farmer, who knows what he is talking about, and what he says the reader of Trotwood’s may rely upon.

Florence is at the head of the famous Mussel Shoals, the opening of which has cost Uncle Sam the sum of seven million dollars.

Uncle Sam never does anything on a small scale, and here, at headquarters, on the banks of the clear, silver river, where seven millions of dollars have been appropriated to unlock 660 miles of navigable water and 1,000 miles of tributary[451] streams, all of which had been locked in the beginning of things and its key hidden to all save the unconquerable spirit of American enterprise, here everything was in keeping with the magnitude of the undertaking and the build and mold of things. It is a paradise in the woods, an Arcadia in primeval forests. It is strength and beauty—a touch of modern art on a background of the antique, a background of rock and beetling cliff, in a setting of sternest and ruggedest realism. Modern houses for offices on the brow of a rock, whose crinkled lips smile a grim and perpetual smile, as if enjoying the joke that a few thousand years will make in the change of man’s baubles above it. Handsome government buildings on a level plateau, surrounded with silence and eternal hills, which half-mockingly look down, as if to say, “Did we not see it ten thousand years ago, when another civilization did the same?” Steel aqueducts, leading captive waters across Shoal creek—a tube of steel binding the waist of this barbarian of the woods, that civilization might walk over his breast—water flowing across water, and that below grumbling with spiteful whirl and jealousy at the usurpation above. A rare picture of the present and the past, of strength and weakness, of beauty and grandeur, but above all the never-changing setting of eternal hills, and through it all the sigh of perpetual silence unbroken by this ripple of living laughter which scarcely touches the skirts of its dream.

No prettier ride than that on the little government railroad which runs for fourteen miles on the edge of the canals and locks, and between it and the river. Now it shoots through classic-looking caves, in somber woods, that brings to one’s mind Keats’ Temple of Latona:

Now it whirls around a great, lofty cliff, around whose neck the red berries cling like beads on savage shoulders, and then into valleys where the skies seem to stoop down to kiss the river.

It is a poem to look at all this—a never-forgotten poem—a poem, and an opera to live and act it.

Strolling through the grounds which Uncle Sam has made to look like a paradise in the wilderness, I ran upon a unique character in Uncle Reuben Paterson,[452] one of your old-time darkies. Uncle Rube is a character in his way. A giant in stature, except a lameness which has made him always prefer riding to walking. Hence this yarn. He is one of the few darkies you meet who is really humorous. Many people think all darkies are more or less funny, and while they are, it is rarely you find one who appreciates the humorous, from an intellect capable of seeing it. It took me some time to draw Uncle Rube out—he is a darky of more than usual intelligence—but when he found I was fond of horses he gave this experience of his in the Civil War:

“You see, boss, I wuz body servant for Colonel Josiah Patterson, endu’in’ de wah, an’ I got inter some purty close places. Bein’ crippled, I seldom could walk much, so I was mighty nigh raised on a hoss. I regards ’em ez bein’ made fur man, an’ I allers thought I wuz entitled to my sheer. Talk about these heah merchines dats run widout hosses, I’d like ter know whut dey’d done in de wah! De wah suited me fine. I got a new hoss ebry time I wanted ’im. Ebry fight we’d get inter I’d come out on a new hoss. I started in on a little gray jackass. At Shiloh I swapped ’im off fer a good government mule. Dat is ter say, I allers called it swappin’ yer know. It’s true Uncle Sam didn’ hev nobody ter repersent ’im at de swappin, but when de fight gits hot an’ his nat’ul agents gits kinder rattled and retires kinder briefly to de reah fur consultation, a-leabin’ fine mules stampedin’ ’roun’ an’ tryin’ ter tramp on my toes, dey needn’ wonder ef I swaps den an’ dar. ’Taint my nature to let no mule tramp ’roun’ over me. Wall, sur, in de scrimmage in Kentucky I swapped de mule fur a fine, gray mare. She wuz mighty good, but wuz kinder mixed gaited. I wuz ’fraid she mout be a knee-banger when I called on her fur speed in a close place, an’ yer know we hed ter come out’n Kentucky purty fas’, boss, purty fas’. We hed cross-firin’ ernuff frum de Yankees, widout bein’ mounted on a mare dat kep’ it up too! Wall, sur, at Mission’ry Ridge I swapped her off fer a black stallion thet come tearin’ out’n de ranks in de full regalier uv a colonel’s saddle, bridle an’ holster. An’ he wuz a good one, an’ I didn’ think he’d need any hobbles. I rid ’im a little while an’ den give ’im ter my colonel. It come so easy ter swap fer ’em I’d ruther do it den ter eat. Whilst de fight wuz goin’ on I’d be swappin’ hosses, an’ I’m black ef in de battle uv Stone Ribber I didn’ mouty nigh mount ebry man in de company. Whilst dey wuz fightin’ I wuz swappin’ hosses, an’ I done hit all frum one little ole bay mule. Ef de wah hed gone on much longer, I b’lieve I’d swapped Uncle Sam afoot.

“But yer ax me about close places. Wall, et warn’t allers a honeymoon. I b’lieves ’twuz in ’63, ennyway we wuz holdin’ back Gin’ral Blair’s corps, an’ Marse Josiah sont me through de enemy ter git ’im er new uniform. Bein’ a nigger, uv co’se I cud pass off fer ennything. I hed dem clo’es an’ wuz steppin th’u’ de ranks all right, when I run splank-dab up agin a reg’ment uv Yankees. I hed de good sense ter th’ow Colonel Josiah’s fine cloes ober in er thicket, an’ ’tend lak I wuz a Union nigger gwine ter meetin. Sez de colonel:

“‘You damned pair uv brackets, whar yer gwine?’

“‘Gwine ter meetin’, boss,’ sez I.

“‘Wall, we’re needin’ a teamster right now more’n you need salvation, so I guess we’ll get you to team a little for us.’

“‘Boss, I cain’t drive er waggin,’ sez I.

“‘Yer cain’t? Wal, we’ll call up er drumhead cote martial in de mawnin’ an’ see erbout it. Yer knows whut dat means, don’t yer?’

“‘Boss,’ sez I, ‘dat’ll jes fetch on mo’ talkin’ an’ sputin, so I’ll do de bes’ I kin ter drive er team.’

“I noticed de colonel wuz mounted on be finest black hoss I hed eber seen, an’ ez dey hed treated me so bad, I concluded den an’ dar I’d swap fer ’im. Dat night dey tuck me to haidquarters an’ made me sleep jes’ outside de colonel’s tent. I’d seed whar dey hed tethered de hoss down by de fence, so ’bout ’leben o’clock, I laid out by de tent, jes outside, and made lak I’d gone ter sleep. When all wuz quiet, I run my han’ under de tent an’ pulled ez easy ez I cud, twell I pulled out de colonel’s bridle. Den I pulled er little at er time twell I got de saddle and[453] holsters, pistols an’ all. I slipped ’em off, put ’em on dat hoss, struck up de crick so ez ter keep frum bringin’ on enny furder talk wid de pickets, an’ I rid dat hoss inter camp, twenty odd miles away, in jes two hours. O, he wuz er dandy, saddle an’ all. Marse Josiah rid dat hoss mouty nigh two years, but I kep’ on a-swappin’.

“But de funnies’ thing happened down in Mississippi whilst we wuz fightin’ Sherman ’roun’ Jackson. Dar wuz er nigger dar named Torm. Torm, he wuz de body-servant ob de colonel ob er Tennessee reg’ment, an’ hed er mighty rep fer bein’ de bes’ furrager in camp. I didn’ ’fess ter bein’ much uv er furrager, but I know Torm cudn’ hold er candle ter me. Marse Josiah ’u’d laff an’ say:

“‘When Rube goes er-furragin’ you’d think we’d done struck de valley ob de Nile.’

“Wal, Sherman wuz keepin’ us purty hot, an’ grub wuz hard ter fin’. In our marchin’ one day I seed a mighty fine mud-lark ober in a farmer’s orchard.

“What’s a mud-lark,” I asked.

“Wal, a mud-lark in wah times,” said Uncle Rube, “is a fatt’nin’ shote, an’ I wanted dis one, but I wanted to tote fair wid Torm, an’ dat ebenin’ I ’proached ’im on de subjec’ uv gwine in partnership wid me an’ dervidin dat hawg up ’twixt our messes. Now, I knowed Torm w’u’d steal de repertashun ob er guvment mule, but when I proached ’im, you jes orter seed ’im git indignant an’ ’low he wuz er genl-mun an’ w’u’dn’ steal no hawg an’ er Christian, an’ all dat. Wall, sur, wheneber er man ’gins to fall back on his ’ligion, I know he’ll do ter watch. ’Sides dat, I nurver did b’lieve in bein’ too active in ercomplishin’ er thing when and gib you de proceeds. Somepin’ in Torm’s talk made me know he wuz gwine at dat berry hawg, so dat night I hid out in de bushes whar he hed ter pass, an’ sho nuff, ’bout midnight heah he come wid dat mud-lark on his back, all done scraped an’ cleaned fer de mess. When he got close ernuff I riz up an’ sez:

“‘Halt! Who goes dar?’

“I seed he thort he’d run inter er Yankee picket, an’ I pulled my gun—bang! bang! bang! Lord, you orter seed ’im drap dat hawg an’ come out’n de woods lak de ole gray hoss a-tearin’ down de wilderness. I tuck de hawg an’ put ’im in our chist, an’ de naix day Torm got me[454] off, lookin’ mighty mournful, an’ ’lowed he wuz mouty nigh starved. Sez he, sheepishly.

“‘Brer Rube, arter I lef’ you, I prayed ober de thing, an’ de angel tole me whar I’d fin’ a fat mud-lark. I bagged ’im in good fashion an’ wuz comin’ home wid ’im when I run inter de whole Yankee army an’ come mouty nigh bein’ kilt, an’ den an’ dar I drapt de purties’ mud-lark dat ever sung in de cane-brakes.’

“Sez I: ‘Brer Torm, arter I lef’ you, I prayed ober de situation too, an’ I tole de angel I wuz crippled an’ c’u’dn’ do much myse’f, but dat I wuz mouty hungry an’ wanted a mud-lark. De righteous am nurver fursaken,’ sez I, ’an’ dat night he made a fool nigger go out an’ fotch me one to my very door.’

“I gin Torm a shoulder,’ laughed the old man, ’an’ he nurver talked no mo’ ’ligion ter me dat yeah.

“But ter show yer jes whut kin’ uv er furrager I kin be when I gits my han’ in,” he went on, “a week or so arter dat, we got clean out, an’ I went out ter git somepin ter eat. I c’u’dn’t fin’ nuffin but some bee hives in a farmyard. Wall, I wuz ez handy wid bees ez I wuz wid mud-larks, an’ de nex’ mawnin’ fo’ gallons ob lubly honey wuz in de haidquarters mess chists.

“De ole farmer raised Cain when he foun’ it out, an’ heah he come down to haidquarters nex’ mawnin to tell de majah. Wall, de majah, he tells de colonel, an’ de colonel he gits mouty mad. He draws de reg’ment up an’ makes ’em er speech, an’ he sez, sezee: ‘Enny man dat’ll rob his countryman am worse dan er dawg;’ an’ ef he c’u’d fin’ de man whut robbed de ole man’s bee-gums he’d hang ’im up by de thum’s. Wall, sur, he talked on twel he git so patriotic he issues er sarch warrant. De fust chist dey went in wuz his’n, an dar sot fo’ gallons ob lubly honey. De colonel looked dum’-founded at de majah, an’ de majah looked jes ez nachul at de colonel, an’ de ole farmer he looked lak he done los’ all ’spect he hed fer de Sudern Confedercy, and den de colonel, he sez ter de majah:

“‘Majah,’ sezee; ‘whyn’t yer tell me ole Rube wuz out furragin las’ night? I’d nurver let you issue dat d— little sarch warrant.’”

The opportunities of the Florence of to-day fills one with wonder and enthusiasm. Here, where once were woods, is a growing city, its manufactories covering the banks of a noble stream, which, with the two greatest railroads in the South—the Louisville & Nashville and the Southern—give it rates and an opportunity unsurpassed anywhere. It is as sure to be a great city as men are to see and hear. Here is the opportunity of a life for any young man who wishes to till the land or to build factories or stores.

But this part of it is all better told by Mr. Sweetland in another chapter herein, and I desist.—Ed. Trotwood.

[455]

Florence As It Was in 1820.

By Anne Royal.

Florence is one of the new towns of this beautiful and rapid rising State. It is happily situated for commerce at the head of steamboat navigation, on the north side of the Tennessee River, in the county of Lauderdale, five miles below the port of the Mussel Shoals, and ten miles from the line of the State of Tennessee.

Florence is to be the great emporium of the northern part of this State. I do not see why it should not; it has a great capital and is patronized by the wealthiest gentlemen in the State. It has a great State at its back; another in front, and a noble river on all sides, the steamboats pouring every necessary and every luxury into its lap. Its citizens, bold, enterprising, and industrious—much more so than any I have seen in the State.

Many large and elegant brick buildings are already built here, (although it was sold out, but two years since), and frame houses are putting up daily. It is not uncommon to see a framed building begun in the morning and finished by night.

Several respectable mercantile houses are established here, and much business is done on commission also. The site of the town is beautifully situated on an eminence, commanding an extensive view of the surrounding country and Tennessee River, from which it is three-quarters of a mile distant. It has two springs of excellent and never failing water. Florence has communication by water with Mississippi, Missouri, Louisiana, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, West Pennsylvania, West Virginia and East Tennessee, and very shortly will communicate with the Eastern States, through the great canal. The great military road that leads from Nashville to New Orleans, by way of Lake Ponchartrain, passes through this town, a number of people who travel through it, and the numerous droves of horses from the lower country, for market, are incredible. Florence contains one printing press, and publishes a paper weekly called the Florence Gazette; it is ably patronized, and edited by one of our first men, and said to be the best paper in the State. Florence is inhabited by people from almost all parts of Europe and the United States; here are English, Irish, Welsh, Scotch, French, Dutch, Germans and Grecians. The first Greek I ever saw was in this town. I conversed with him on the subject of his country, but found him grossly ignorant. He butchers for the town, and has taken to his arms a mullatto woman for a wife. He very often takes an airing on horseback of a Sunday afternoon, with his wife, riding by his side, and both arrayed in shining costumes.

The river at Florence is upwards of five hundred yards wide; it is ferried in a large boat worked by four horses, and crosses in a few minutes.

There are two large and well kept taverns in Florence, and several doggeries. A doggery is a place where spiritous liquors are sold; and where men get drunk, quarrel and fight, as often as they choose, but where there is nothing to eat for man or beast. Did you ever hear anything better named. “I swear!” said a Yankee pedler, one day, with both his eyes bunged up, “that are doggery be rightly named. Never seed the like on’t. If I get to hum agin it’l be a nice man’l catch me in these here parts. Awfullest place one could be at.” It appeared the inmates of the doggery enticed him under pretense of buying his wares, and forced him to drink; and then forced him to fight; but the poor little Yankee was sadly beaten. Not content with blackening his eyes, they overturned his tin cart, and scattered his tins to the forewinds, frightened his horse and tormented his very soul out about lasses, etc. He was a laughable object, but to hear his dialect in laying off the law, was a complete farce, particularly[456] when Pat came to invite him into the same doggery to drink friends: “I ben’t a dog to go into that are dog house.”

The people, you see, know a thing or two, here; they call things by their right names. But to proceed. There may be about one hundred dwelling houses and stores, a court house, and several warehouses in Florence. The latter are, however, on the river. One of the longest buildings I ever saw is in Florence. It was built by a company of gentlemen, and is said to have cost ninety thousand dollars, and is not yet finished. The proprietors, being of this place, are men of immense wealth, and are pushing their capital with great foresight and activity. For industry and activity, Florence outstrips all the northern towns in the State. More people travel this road than all our western roads put together. I was just going to conclude, when an old German passing through my room, from that of my landlady’s, made me laugh, in reply to something uttered by the lady, he said: “Poverty was no crime, when came honestly by it.”

More of Florence. I observed in my last, the surprising wealth of this place. The principal gentlemen of wealth are General Coffee, James Jackson, Esq., Major McKinley (now a Senator in Congress from Alabama), and Messrs. Simpson and Gaither. Of these J. Jackson is said to be not only wealthy, but the wealthiest man in the State. There are, however, many others quite easy in their circumstances. General Coffee, and J. Jackson live out of town. Major McKinley lives in Florence, and is reputed to be the first lawyer in the three States. He is a stout, fine looking man; of easy manners, as all gentlemen are; and his dwelling contains more taste and splendor, by one-half, than I ever saw in my whole life put together. But this is nothing. Mrs. McKinley, the elegance of her manners, and the sweetness of her conversation, joined with her interesting children, completely disconcerted me. Everything in the house had, to me, the appearance of enchantment. I never was in such a paradise before. Mrs. McKinley looked as though she had dropped from above. I never was more confounded. And the children. They are truly a pattern. The dear little things were in the nursery, and hearing there was a stranger in the parlor, prevailed on the nurse to open the door, a few inches, that they might see who was there, but they were instantly upbraided by their mother. Make these a pattern for your children, if you should have any. I begged admission for the dear creatures, and they were admitted upon condition of good behavior. They were the handsomest children I ever beheld, and I was so completely fascinated by their manners, I forget every thing else. Mrs. McKinley informed me she was from Philadelphia, and was acquainted with Mrs. Dr. Charles Lewis.

All the ladies of Florence excel in the domestic virtues. No gadding abroad. They demean themselves with that modesty and attention to their domestic affairs, beyond any ladies I have seen in the State. Mrs. Coffee (a niece of Mrs. General Jackson), comes to preaching in a plain bonnet and calico dress. General Coffee was here since I arrived, and appears to be much reduced since I saw him in Huntsville. His constitution was much injured by the hardships he suffered in the army. I was never in speaking of James Jackson. It is said he is a native of Ireland. Mrs. Ward, Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Southworth, the printer’s wife, and several others, are charming women. Captain Gibson, a son of the brave Colonel Gibson, of Tennessee, is one of the most amiable men on earth.

It is unaccountable why such a number of physicians should flock into this country. Every town is flooded with them. They are strung along the roads like so many blacksmith’s shops. You can either walk or ride, but you have a physician on each side, one in front, and one in rear. Here are seven in Florence, seven more went away for want of room. There are also here, six lawyers. I left thirteen doctors in Courtland, a much smaller place. One hundred passed through the latter, south, unable to get in. You cannot, as I stated before, travel a mile on any great road, without meeting with a doctor’s shop. But this is not all. Almost every practising doctor has three or four students. I have known mechanics quit their trade and commence the study of medicine.

[457]

Florence, Alabama
THE COMING CITY OF THE SOUTH

In writing the story of Florence, it is our intention to do it in a different way from the usual method of writing such stories. Trotwood’s Monthly is known as the magazine that is “Different” and we want to be that way. The fact that “John Smith came here in 1869, commenced farming under innumerable disadvantages, was married on February 5, 1874 to Miss Mary Jones, and that the union was blessed with several children, and that his sterling worth as a citizen and business man, is highly appreciated, etc., etc.,” may be gratifying to the vanity of John Smith, but does it help Florence? We think not, and will, therefore, write the story in a “Different” way.

The history of Florence from the day of the Moundbuilders has been told in this issue by Mr. John Trotwood Moore, in his “Southern Travels.” It is our intention only to tell of the commercial advantages, and tell it without any “hot air” attachments. Probably the most interesting story to be told in connection with Florence at the present time is the story of Mussel Shoals, for what it means to Florence, no one at this time can tell. If it is true that the waste waters of the great canal are to be harnessed, and electricity transmitted to the surrounding territory, it simply means that “Greater Florence” will be the leading city of Alabama, and one of the leading cities of the entire South. The story of Mussel Shoals has been written, and appears in this number, and the main stem of the story is facts. We prefer to allow our readers to form their own conclusions as to the result, but it is easy enough to see that it will mean the present Florence will give way to the Greater Florence, and rank with the best Southern cities. We would not be dealing in facts if we tried to convey the idea that Florence alone is to be benefitted by this contemplated improvement, for it means that the surrounding country[458] and the neighboring town and cities will also reap their share of the prosperity incidental to this improvement.

Florence is an ideal place for a home. It is much easier to tell what they have not got, than to tell of the many advantages. There is an abundance of pure water, an ideal climate, good schools, good society, an abundance of the most beautiful scenery to be found anywhere and if there is any disadvantages around Florence from the standpoint of its being a desirable place to live, we failed to discover it. The price of real estate in Florence, as compared with values quoted elsewhere, is below the average. A more desirable home can be bought in Florence for the money than can be bought most any place else in the South. Florence has more modern homes that are up-to-date in architecture than many places twice the size. Every street shows the progressiveness of the citizens in building homes that are a credit to Florence and to Northern Alabama.

Two live newspapers cover the local field thoroughly, and they are not spending any time slinging muddy editorials at each other, but are interested in the development of Florence, and both are a credit to the city. Their equipment is superior to that found in many offices twice the size, and their columns are bright and full of the latest news.

When a manufacturer investigates with a view to locating, he invariably asks: “What are the banking facilities?” Florence can well be proud of her banks, and a glance at their advertisements herein will tell the story. The First National has stood the test of time, and the Alabama Trust and Savings Bank show by their deposits that they have the entire confidence of the people, for they are but a few months old. These banks are safe and reliable, conservative and up-to-date.

Florence is noted for her educational institutions, and with the best graded schools and colleges can offer more in the way of educational features than many cities of larger size.

Florence has transportation advantages that place her in a commanding position, and with competition from two railroads and the Tennessee River, and with other railroads under consideration, is placed in close touch with the markets of the world.

There is probably no city in the United States that enjoys better advantages than Florence as a manufacturing point. Competing railroads and river transportation, cheap fuel, cheap labor, right at the door of one of the biggest furnaces in the South, they are able to get the best grade of iron at a very low cost, and without the usual transportation charges added.

Lumber in abundance, and right at the door of the best coal mines in the South. Cheap power is one of the essential features of a successful manufacturing point, and even with the present conditions to say nothing of the Mussel Shoals improvement, it places Florence ahead of most any city in the South as a manufacturing center.

As an example of the advantages of locating a manufacturing plant in Florence we will cite the case of the Stove[459] Foundry. They are at the very door of the Philadelphia Furnace, and have in many cases had deliveries of iron on two hours’ notice—sometimes less. Now comes the point: Detroit is one of the greatest stove manufacturing cities in the United States. Records show that pig iron is being shipped from Florence to Detroit, and that finished stoves are being shipped from Detroit to Florence. Labor is cheaper in Florence than in Detroit. Fuel is cheaper, water is cheaper, and in fact everything is cheaper. The Florence foundries can make and ship a finished casting to northern points for the same rate the raw material can be shipped, and yet a great deal of the finished product finds its way back to Florence and points further South. There are a thousand arguments in favor of Florence, and none against her. Everything is better and conditions are better in every way. The climate is elegant, scenery sublime, and one of the most healthy locations in the United States.

A story of Florence without mention of their excellent street railway would not be complete. The Sheffield Company operate a line of cars between Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia, that are strictly up-to-date, and the same attention is paid to the wants of the people as though they were compelled to fight an aggressive competitor for every fare. These cars connect the L. & N. and Southern depots, and give Florence a service that they are proud of and appreciate. There is a friendly rivalry existing between the cities of Florence, Sheffield and Tuscumbia, as there always is when towns are located close together, and to ask a man in Sheffield what he thought of Florence, he would look as though he never heard of the place, and to ask a man in Florence what he thought of Sheffield, he would say that any man living in Sheffield when he could just as well live in Florence should be fined and imprisoned on suspicion, but in dividing his favors in the way of street car service, Mr. J. W. Worthington, the Vice President and active man, is impartial, and gives all three cities a service that is strictly first-class.

The Sheffield Company also furnish electric lights and power to Florence, and are daily improving the service and extending their wires.

Florence could well be called a “City of Schools and Churches,” for in that respect they are far above the average city. Their schools, as before mentioned, are of the highest order, and their churches represent all denominations. There is the Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Trinity Episcopal, Catholic and[460] Christian. The people are unusually devoted to the churches, and contribute liberally to their support.

Florence now has approximately three miles of cement sidewalks and is now advertising for bids for the construction of twenty-seven miles additional. Florence will use something like ten million brick within the next few months, as several large buildings are now being constructed and the plans are being drawn for many more.

Florence now has industries that represent a money investment of about one and a half million dollars, fine schools and churches, street railway, electric lights and gas, honest city government, an up-to-date and efficient fire department, police protection, telegraph, telephones, public parks, and in fact everything required to make it a desirable place to engage in business and to reside. It will welcome new industries and good citizens. It is in need of various industries to use the waste material from the wagon works, stave factories and planing mills, and can offer greater inducements to parties interested than any other city in the South.

It would be unfair to this intelligent city, filled, as it is, with schools, colleges and churches, not to make mention of its valuable library.

Since its inception in 1885 it has continued to furnish to the reading public of Florence the best literature, consisting of prose and poetry, history, science and fiction.

There are more than 2,000 volumes, well shelved and properly cared for. The library, while not entirely free, is open to all, and intended for all. One day of every week books can be procured and a membership fee of $1.00 per year is charged, this amount being used for the purchase of the new books, a stipulated sum being spent each year for historical works and reference books for students.

The books are carefully selected when purchased, there being a special book committee charged with this duty. The library is under the direction of twelve lady directors, selected for their special fitness for the work. They are:

Mrs. Erister Ashcraft, President; Mrs. John R. Price, Vice President; Mrs. Emmet O’Neal, Secretary; Mrs. L. M. Humphries, Treasurer; Mrs. W. P. Campbell, Mrs. C. E. Jordan, Mrs. H. B. Lee, Miss Nettie Simpson, Mrs. M. W. Cample, Mrs. M. C. Nelson, Mrs. L. B. Frierson, Mrs. G. N. Smith.

MUSSEL SHOALS.

By Erister Ashcraft.

In the future development of the resources of Florence and her surrounding territory, a new and powerful factor must be taken into consideration. It is only a matter of a short time when the hitherto wasted energy of Mussel Shoals will be harnessed into a power, second only to that of Niagara.

[461]

[462]

Much has been written concerning these immense falls, but it is the purpose of this article to give only such facts as will be of interest and practical use to prospective developers of this great power, and to those who are to help build up this beautiful valley into one of the busiest manufacturing centers in the United States.

In a general way the value and importance of this great power is expressed by one of the ablest American engineers who has examined and surveyed these shoals: “There is no place in the world where greater advantages are to be found for the harnessing of water power for the uses of industry, or where there is greater power awaiting development within reach of the seaboard by water and by rail transportation than Mussel Shoals.”

The following, from the report of Chief Engineer F. H. Newell, and incorporated by Senator Morgan in his recent report to the Senate on the “Navigation of the Tennessee River,” is reproduced here as being the most accurate and authentic account of the various important features of the Mussel Shoals with reference to their capacity for developing power:

“In the Tennessee river, in the vicinity of Florence, Ala., are several shoals capable of the development of power.

“The shoals are a succession of cascades, amid many islands, in a river bed varying in width from a half-mile to three miles. The difference between high and low water is only five or six feet, corresponding to a rise of fifty feet at Chattanooga. Beginning at Brown’s Ferry, twelve miles below Decatur, Ala., the river has the following falls:

“From Brown’s Ferry to the mouth of Elk river the fall is twenty-six feet in eleven miles. This is known as ‘Elk River Shoals.’ Its most precipitous part is at the lower end, where there is a fall of 16.5 feet in about four miles.

“From the mouth of Elk river to the head of Mussel Shoals, a distance of five miles, there is a fall of only two feet.

“From the head of Mussel Shoals to Bainbridge the fall is eighty-five feet in seventeen miles, and is known as ‘Mussel Shoals.’

“From Bainbridge to Florence the fall is twenty-three feet in seven miles, and is known as ‘Little Mussel Shoals.’

“From Florence to the head of Colbert Shoals the fall is three feet in eleven miles.

“From the head of Colbert Shoals to Waterloo is, therefore, 160 feet in a distance of fifty-seven miles. Sixteen miles of the distance, however, has a fall of only five feet, leaving a fall of 155 feet in forty-one miles that cover the four shoals mentioned. The shoals are really more precipitous than the foregoing figures would indicate. For instance, 84.6 feet of the fall at Mussel Shoals is in a distance of fourteen miles.”

The general surface of the water on these shoals is comparatively smooth and of even depth in its levels across the river, with no deep fissures to interfere with the building of dams at any location that may be selected. The islets and projecting rocks can be taken into the structure of the dams at a considerable advantage in the cost of such works.

The bed and banks of the river are only subject to slight changes, and improvements, when made, are therefore practically permanent.

[463]

[464]

This section of the Tennessee river runs through a fertile and beautiful upland, presenting on both shores bluffs or rock of strong texture that afford very extensive and excellent quarries for all structural purposes, while the rocks for the rougher work of dam construction are abundantly supplied in the bed of the river. These bluffs break away into beautiful farm lands, and the high lands and salubrious climate insure healthful homes.

Directly tributary are all the elements necessary for a great manufacturing center.

The nearby iron, coal and phosphate fields are among the richest in the world, and the supply of lime- and sandstone for manufacturing and building purposes is inexhaustible. Forests of timber of both hard and soft woods of every description are near at hand, and bordering the river banks from Chattanooga to Johnsonville are the most productive cotton fields of the South. Labor is skilled and plentiful.

It has been impossible to develop this great power heretofore, as the government has refused to allow the construction of dams across the river, but by the recent Act of Congress such permission has been granted.

With the immense supply of raw material of every kind in this section, sufficient manufacturing industries may be added here to consume the power generated from these shoals, making us the most important manufacturers of wood, iron, cotton, etc., in the United States.

Estimated minimum net horsepower of Tennessee river in Alabama on turbines realizing eighty per cent. of the theoretical power:

When the present general manager of the Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Company started in business some seven years ago, his stock in trade consisted of plenty of pluck and a hoe. With the assistance of one man, he mixed his fertilizer with a hoe, and the first day’s output was eleven bags of fertilizer. The first week showed up a total of 55 bags. Without telling of the seven years of hard and persistent work, will say that any of the eight mills in this plant to-day can mix as much fertilizer in twenty minutes as they did the first week. There is probably no brand of fertilizer sold to-day in any market that gives more satisfaction than their famous “Tiger” brand, for in this formula is represented the very best work of the general manager, who has given practically every hour of his time to the upbuilding of the business, and his motto is: “The Very Best That Can be Produced.”

The company own their own phosphate fields in Maury and Hickman counties, Tennessee, and daily receive shipments of the raw material, where it is quickly converted into their forty different brands. “King Cotton Grower” is probably their most popular seller, as it is especially adapted to the growing of cotton, and no expense has been spared to make it perfect, and as imitation is a sure sign of superiority, the company have been compelled upon several occasions to fight for their rights to use this name for their product. No better recommendation for their goods could be given than the fact that their very best customers and friends are the ones that started to buy their goods when the company was first organized, and who have continued to stand by them in their fight to give the people the very best. They make a special study of the needs of the farmer, and make their formulas accordingly, and while it is safe to say that it would be hard to improve on their different brands, which are all made with scientific accuracy, yet they are always ready to make any special formulas, and will take such orders and deliver them promptly.

Growing to such proportions in such few years and fighting the trust at the same time is certainly a record that could not be built on anything but honest principles and meritorious goods.

The Florence Wagon Works was established in 1882 in Atlanta, Ga. Was reorganized and moved to Florence, Ala., in 1889, and has been in constant operation since that time.

During the twelve years ending with 1905, this company has manufactured and distributed over 89,000 farm wagons, paying to its employees for labor and salary something over $797,000. The volume of business has been considerably more than $3,000,000. During that time it has paid to the railroads more than $200,000 for freight. These figures will give an approximate idea of the extent of business done by this institution.

It is in the heart of the very best supply of hard wood for wagon purposes. Being situated only across the river from the large furnaces and rolling mills of Sheffield it is enabled to secure its supply of iron under the most favorable conditions.

[465]

[466]

The entire factory is equipped with the most modern machinery for manufacturing and handling its large output, which is growing in popularity every year and the territory covered is being extended annually, now reaching from Virginia to Mexico, and from the Atlantic coast to the far West.

One of the most interesting features of Florence, is the Cypress Creek dam, on the land of Mr. F. M. Perry. There is a great opportunity for the development of sufficient electric power to supply the needs of Florence, and taking the figures of a prominent surveyor at Florence, it is estimated that this dam will furnish something like 12,000 horse power daily. The owner is reluctant to make any statement as to the possibilities, but prefers to let those interested investigate. We print herein a picture of the old dam that was in use before the war, and the present owner started to rebuild it some time ago, but before it was completed, a heavy rise washed away a part of it and he has made no further progress. The creek makes a big bend, and while it is some three miles around, by[467] tunnelling through some 600 feet, it will give a fall of thirty feet, and by building a dam at the site of the present dam, or rather by finishing the one partly constructed, elevating it ten feet, it will back the water of Cypress Creek to a point where a tunnel of 300 feet will give a forty foot fall, and will discharge at the point shown in the second picture of the old cotton factory that was destroyed during the war, and which was never rebuilt. There is something like 1,000 acres of land with this privilege and to sum the whole thing up, taking the estimate made by City Engineer Major A. G. Negley, as a basis, an expenditure of $2,000 to finish the dam, $6,000 for the tunnel and $2,000 for the turbine would give electricity to furnish power enough to meet all the demands of Florence and the surrounding country.

Before the war there were three dams practically in sight of each other that furnished the power for a grist mill and two cotton factories.

For further information, address the owner, F. M. Perry, Florence, Alabama.

The Manual Training Department of the Alabama State Normal under the supervision of Prof. F. T. Nisbet, is one of the most interesting parts of Florence. Mr. Nisbet is a graduate of Atheneum and Mechanics Institute, Rochester, N. Y., and was at the head of manual training in the city schools of Yonkers, N. Y. He introduced manual training in the University of Alabama where he taught for two years at the summer school for teachers. It enables a pupil to demonstrate their ideas, and tends to develop the ability to express their thoughts in many ways. The Manual Training Department in Florence ranks with the very best in the country.

ASHCRAFT COTTON FACTORY.

It is hard to say anything of interest in regard to this institution other than what is stated in their advertisement. It was organized in 1900 with a capital stock of $100,000, which was increased the following year to $150,000. Their goods are in such demand that they are several months behind on orders, and, as stated, in their advertisement, are the first company in the United States to use the entire product of the cotton field. The factory contains 6,240 spindles and 200 looms, employing several hundred hands. The factory is one of the best equipped and most up-to-date factories in the United States, and the fact that their product is sold for several months ahead is conclusive evidence that their goods are of unusual merit. C. W. Ashcraft is President and General Manager, John T. Ashcraft, Vice President, and Erister Ashcraft, Secretary and Treasurer.

The two accompanying pictures of “Light Running Florence” wagons tell more than could be told in several pages.

The 3½ Florence Wagon that brought a load of 86 people to the fair at Murfreesboro, carried an estimated weight of 13,000 pounds, or six times as much as the ordinary farmer hauls at a load. The ordinary log wagon is seldom called on to hold up a load to exceed four or five thousand pounds, and oftener less, yet the “Light Running Florence” managed[468] to carry a solid stone base weighing 22,000 pounds, and without injury to the wagon in any way. There must be a reason for this. If the wagons were built to conform with the claims of the Florence Wagon Works, as to the amount of tonnage capacity, they would certainly not be misleading the public or the purchaser, but when a wagon will carry more than five times as much as they claim it will, and ten times as much as the ordinary farmer wants to haul, there is but one answer; the wagon is built on honor. It would be pretty hard to get anything but an honest wagon from this factory, for unless a man be honest with himself, he could not be honest with his employer, and the record for industry, temperance, and general citizenship is certainly broken when you investigate[469] the class of men that make these wagons. Many of the employes own their own homes, contribute liberally to churches and charity and patronize the schools, and a larger Sunday school class can be found from the children of this industrious lot of people than can be found most anywhere, considering the number of employes. There is not a “boozefighter” in their employ, and the standard of manhood and citizenship is certainty commendable.

The Ashcraft Oil Mills is one of the tributary industries of the Ashcraft Cotton Mills, where the by-products are handled, and is under the same management. In addition they operate several gins in the territory adjacent to Florence, to insure an adequate supply of seed for the manufacture of their product. Several years ago when there was little or no demand for cotton seed hulls, they advertised that they would for a limited time give away absolutely free their output of cotton seed hulls that the farmers and stock raisers might learn of its value as a feed. It was rather hard at[470] first to give them away, but it resulted in creating a demand until now the entire output is sold with little or no advertising.

We print on this page the picture of Hon. Emmet O’Neal, and his beautiful residence in Florence. Mr. O’Neal is a candidate for the nomination for Lieutenant Governor. He is a son of the late Governor O’Neal, and it is only fitting that he should in time succeed his illustrious father. Mr. O’Neal is best liked where best known, and if the people of Florence were the only ones to be consulted his election would be unanimous. He is a native of Lauderdale County, and has always been a prominent factor in the Democratic affairs of the State. His residence, known as the old Foster home, on North Court street, is one of the old historic landmarks, and one of the finest homes in Florence.

Our advertisers represent the progressive business firms of Florence, and while we did not secure assistance from all of the business houses in Florence by any means, we certainly have reasons to be proud of our list. Florence has a hundred other business firms not mentioned herein. There are several wholesale houses, numerous retail stores that are a credit to any town, and, in fact, everything necessary to make up a first-class city, including hotels, restaurants, drug stores, livery stables, etc., foundries, machine shops, ice factory, steam laundry, etc., etc.

“Say what you please about us,” said Mr. J. W. Worthington, “but tell it just as you see it. State the facts, and we will stand by you. Charge me up with my part of the expense to advertise Florence, and send me the bill.” Is it a wonder that Florence is growing when the people interested in her future are willing to open their pocketbook and do not ask for anything to be said about them but the truth?

Rogers Bros. have used more space to advertise Florence than they have to advertise their own business. It is said[471] that either of the brothers will go without his meals to do something that will benefit Florence. They own some stock in practically every industry in Florence, and will take stock in new industries.

Picture of Patton School at Florence, Alabama, and of Miss Freda Bose, who won the gold medal offered by the Florence Chapter, U. D. C., for the best essay on the subject, “The Reconstruction Period.” The Patton School was erected in 1890, at a cost of something over $22,000. Miss Bose is a daughter of John Bose, General Agent of the L. & N. Railroad, and is thirteen years old.

Notes of Florence.

Read the ad of Tennessee Valley Fertilizer Co.—From a hoe and one man to a business requiring the investment of $150,000 in less than ten years, and still growing.

F. M. Perry in talking of his Cypress Creek property says: “Don’t say a word that we can’t substantiate.” We have given facts alone. Investigate if you are interested.

Read the advertisement of the Florence Wagon Works. It is interesting even if you never expect to buy a wagon.

Mr. Percy Jones, the President of Cherry Cotton Mills, said: “There is nothing we care to advertise, at least from our own mills, as we do not sell to the consumer, but we run our card in order that we may help to advertise Florence.” This is the spirit that makes a city grow.

Parties coming to Florence can depend on getting all the comforts of home at The Jefferson. The manager is a practical hotel man, and can adapt himself to circumstances. His chef quit a short time ago, and Mr. Negley cooked the breakfast. The only difference noticeable was an improvement.

“Don’t use any space telling about me,” said Mr. Richardson, of the Acme Lumber Company. “What we want is to advertise Florence, and it you have anything nice to say, say it about our growing little city. I am willing to pay my part; don’t wish any personal bouquets.”

The Alabama Stove Company sell more goods than they can make, yet they cut the conversation short by saying: “We are in for anything that will help Florence.” Their advertisement is inserted in order that they might have an excuse for helping to “boost.” Mr. Berger seems to have the habit of “boosting” on the slightest provocation.

It you are interested in Florence, or wish to know anything about Florence, we publish the advertisement of the representative real estate firms, and we can assure you that facts are their main assets. Write them for information.

A visit to the Temple Planing Mill reminded us of the story of the fight between the railroad presidents. The president that owned the small road remarked that his line might not be as long as the other one, but it was just as wide. We do not remember ever having seen a busier shop, and they probably turn out more material in a month than some mills of larger pretentions.

Florence has three banks.

[472]

Anderson-Cathey Co.

(INCORPORATED)

FLORENCE, ALABAMA

Real Estate, Immigration and Rental Agents

Abstractors of land titles in Florence and Lauderdale County. Dealers in timber and mineral lands, farms and city property.

Issue booklets every four months descriptive of our section of country and containing lists of lands for sale. These booklets are mailed extensively throughout the North and West and will be mailed anyone upon request.