It occurred to me, after I had recorded the events of our short but truly vigorous and eventful campaign, to write to R. W. Gilder and ask him—quid memoriae datum est—"what memories he had of that great war, wherein we starved and swore, and all but died." There are men in whose letters we are as sure to find genial life as a spaccio di vino or wine-shop in a Florentine street, and this poet-editor is one of them. And he replied with an epistle not at all intended for type, which I hereby print without his permission, and in defiance of all the custom or courtesy which inspires gentlemen of the press.

"May 8th, 1893. "EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT, THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, "UNION SQUARE, NEW YORK.

"MY DEAR LELAND: How your letter carries me back! Do you know that one night when I was trudging along in the dark over a road-bed where had been scattered some loose stones to form a foundation, I heard you and another comrade talking me over in the way to which you refer in your letter? Well, it was either you or the other comrade who said you had given me something to eat, and I know that I must have seemed very fragile, and at times woe-begone. I was possibly the youngest in the crowd. I was nineteen, and really enjoyed it immensely notwithstanding.

"I remember you in those days as a splendid expressor of our miseries. You had a magnificent vocabulary, wherewith you could eloquently and precisely describe our general condition of starvation, mud, ill-equippedness, and over-work. As I think of those days, I hear reverberating over the mountain-roads the call, 'Cannoneers to the wheels!' and in imagination I plunge knee-deep into the mire and grab the spokes of the caisson. {266a}

"Do you remember the night we spent at the forge? I burnt my knees at the fire out-doors, while in my ears was pouring a deluge from the clouds. I finally gave it up, and spent the rest of the night crouching upon the fire-bed of the forge itself, most uncomfortably.

"You will remember that we helped dig the trenches at the fort on the southern side of the river from Harrisburg, {266b} and that one section of the battery got into a fight near that fort; nor can you have forgotten when Stuart Patterson's hand was shot off at Carlisle. As he passed me, I heard him say, 'My God, I'm shot!' That night, after we were told to retire out of range of the cannon, while we were lying under tree near one of the guns, an officer called for volunteers to take the piece out of range. I stood up with three others, but seeing and hearing a shell approach, I cried out, 'Wait a moment!'—which checked them. Just then the shell exploded within a yard of the cannon. If we had not paused, some of us would surely have been hit. We then rushed out, seized the cannon, and brought it out of range.

"By the way, General William F. Smith (Baldy Smith) has since told me that he asked permission to throw the militia (including ourselves) across one of Lee's lines of retreat. If he had been permitted to do so, I suppose you and I would not have been in correspondence now.

"You remember undoubtedly the flag of truce that came up into the town before the bombardment began. The man was on horseback and had the conventional white flag. The story was that Baldy Smith sent word 'that if they wanted the town they could come and take it.' {267} I suppose you realise that we were really a part of Meade's right, and that we helped somewhat to delay the rebel left wing. Do you not remember hearing from our position at Carlisle the guns of that great battle—the turning-point of the war? {268}

"I could run on in this way, but your own memory must be full of the subject. I wish that we could sometime have a reunion of the old battery in Philadelphia. I have a most distinct and pleasant remembrance of your brother—a charming personality indeed, a handsome refined face and dignified bearing. I remember being so starved as to eat crackers that had fallen on the ground; and I devoured, too, wheat from the fields rubbed in the hands to free it from the ear. . . .

"Sincerely, R. W. GILDER.

"P.S.—I could write more, but you will not need it from me."

Truly, I was that other comrade whom Gilder overheard commending him, and it was I who gave him something to eat, I being the one in camp who looked specially after two or three of the youngest to see that they did not starve, and who doctored the invalids.

I here note, with all due diffidence, that Mr. Gilder chiefly remembers me as "a splendid expressor of our miseries, with a magnificent vocabulary" wherewith to set forth fearful adversities. I have never been habitually loquacious in life; full many deem me deeply reticent and owl-like in my taciturnity, but I "can hoot when the moon shines," nor is there altogether lacking in me in great emergencies a certain rude kind of popular eloquence, which has—I avow it with humility—enabled me invariably to hold my own in verbal encounters with tinkers, gypsies, and the like, among whom "chaff" is developed to a degree of which few respectable people have any conception, and which attains to a refinement of sarcasm, originality, and humour in the London of the lower orders, for which there is no parallel in Paris, or in any other European capital; so that even among my earliest experiences I can remember, after an altercation with an omnibus-driver, he applied to me the popular remark that he was "blessed if he didn't believe that the gemman had been takin' lessons in language hof a cab-driver, and set up o' nights to learn." But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vigorous Londoner in "de elegant fluency of sass," as darkies term it, and it moves my heart to think that, after thirty years, and after the marvellous experiences of men who are masters of our English tongue which the editor of the Century must have had, he still retains remembrance of my oratory!

At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadelphia. I need not say that we were welcome, or that I enjoyed baths, clean clothes, and the blest sensation of feeling decent once more. Everything in life seemed to be luxurious as it had never been before. Luxuries are very conventional. A copy of Praetorius, for which I paid only fifteen shillings, was to me lately a luxury for weeks; so is a visit to a picture gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emergency to realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions of happiness.

Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, the seeds of typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as possible, and went with my wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, or nieces by marriage, and child- nephew, Edward Robins, to Cape May, a famous bathing-place by the ocean. One of the little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Robins, then six years of age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and "a writer of books," while Edward has risen in journalism in Philadelphia. There as I walked often eighteen or twenty miles a day by the sea, when the thermometer was from 90 to 100 degrees in the shade, I soon worked away all apprehension of typhoid and developed muscle. One day I overheard a man in the next bathing-house asking who I was. "I don't know," replied the other, "but if I were he, I'd go in for being a prize-fighter."

Everybody was poor in those days, so we went to a very cheap though respectable hotel, where we paid less than half of what we had always given at "The Island," and where we were in company quite as happy or comfortable as we ever had been anywhere, though the death of her brother weighed sadly on my poor wife, and her dear good mother, whom I always loved tenderly, and with whom I never had a shade of difference of opinion nor a whisper of even argument, and to whom I was always devoted. I seem to have been destined to differ from other mortals in a few things: one was, that I always loved my mother-in-law with whole heart and soul, and never considered our menage as perfect unless she were with us. She was of very good and rather near English descent, a Callender, and had been celebrated in her youth for extraordinary beauty. Her husband was related to the celebrated beauty Miss Vining, whom Maria Antoinette, from the fame of her loveliness, invited to come and join her court. At the beginning of this century no great foreigner travelled in America without calling on Miss Vining in Delaware. There is a life of her in Griswold's "Republican Court." It is without any illustrative portrait. I asked Dr. Griswold why he had none. He replied that none existed. I said to him severely, "Let this be a lesson to you never to publish anything without submitting it first to me. I have a photograph of her miniature." The Doctor submitted!

This summer at Cape May I made the acquaintance of a very remarkable man named Solomon. He was a Jew, and we became intimate. One evening he said to me: "You know so much about the Jews that I have even learned something from you about them. But I can teach you something. Can you tell the difference between the Aschkenazim and the Sephardim by their eyes? No! Well, now, look!" Just then a Spanish-looking beauty from New Orleans passed by. "There is Miss Inez Aguado; observe that the corners of her eyes are long with a peculiar turn. Wait a minute; now, there is Miss Lowenthal—Levi, of course—of Frankfort. Don't you see the difference?"

I did, and asked him to which of the classes he belonged. He replied—

"To neither. I am of the sect of the ancient Sadducees, who took no part in the Crucifixion."

Then I replied, "You are of the Karaim."

"No; that is still another sect or division, though very ancient indeed. We never held to the Halacha, and we laugh at the Mishna and Talmud and all that. We do not believe or disbelieve in a God—Yahveh, or the older Elohim. We hold that every man born knows enough to do what is right; and that is religion enough. After death, if he has acted up to this, he will be all right should there be a future of immortality; and if he hasn't, he will be none the worse off for it. We are a very small sect. We call ourselves the Neu Reformirte. We have a place of worship in New York."

This was the first agnostic whom I had ever met. I thought of the woman in Jerusalem who ran about with the torch to burn up heaven and the water to extinguish hell-fire. Yes, the sect was very old. The Sadducees never denied anything; they only inquired as to truth. Seek or Sikh!

I confess that Mr. Solomon somewhat weakened the effect of his grand free- thought philosophy by telling me in full faith of a Rabbi in New York who was so learned in the Cabala that by virtue of the sacred names he could recover stolen goods. Whether, like Browning's sage, he also received them, I did not learn. But c'est tout comme chez nous autres. The same spirit which induces a man to break out of orthodox humdrumness, induces him to love the marvellous, the forbidden, the odd, the wild, the droll—even as I do. It is not a fair saying that "atheists are all superstitious, which proves that a man must believe in something." No; it is the spirit of nature, of inquiry, of a desire for the new and to penetrate the unknown; and under such influence a man may truly be an atheist as regards what he cannot prove or reconcile with universal love and mercy, and yet a full believer that magic and ghosts may possibly exist among the infinite marvels and mysteries of nature. It is admitted that a man may believe in God without being superstitious; it is much truer that he may be "superstitious" (whatever that means) without believing that there is an anthropomorphic bon Dieu. However this may be, Mr. Solomon made me reflect often and deeply for many a long year, until I arrived to the age of Darwin.

I also made at Cape May the acquaintance of a very remarkable man, whom I was destined to often meet in other lands in after years. This was Carrol (not as yet General) Tevis. We first met thus. The ladies wanted seats out on the lawn, and there was not a chair to be had. He and I were seeking in the hotel-office; all the clerks were absent, and all the chairs removed; but there remained a solid iron sofa or settee, six feet long, weighing about 600 pounds. Tevis was strong, and a great fencer; there is a famous botte which he invented, bearing his name; perhaps Walter H. Pollock knows it. I gave the free-lance or condottiero a glance, and proposed to prig the iron sofa and lay waste the enemy. It was a deed after his Dugald Dalgetty heart, and we carried it off and seated the ladies.

In the autumn there was a vast Sanitary Fair for the benefit of the army hospitals held in Philadelphia. I edited for it a daily newspaper called Our Daily Fare, which often kept me at work for eighteen hours per diem, and in doing which I was subjected to much needless annoyance and mortification. At this Fair I saw Abraham Lincoln.

It was about this time that the remarkable oil fever, or mania for speculating in oil-lands, broke out in the United States. Many persons had grown rich during the war, and were ready to speculate. Its extent among all classes was incredible. Perhaps the only parallel to it in history was the Mississippi Bubble or the South Sea speculations, and these did not collectively employ so much capital or call out so much money as this petroleum mania. It had many strange social developments, which I was destined to see in minute detail.

My first experience was not very pleasant. A publisher in New York asked me to write him a humorous poem on the oil mania. It was to be large enough to make a small volume. I did so, and in my opinion wrote a good one. It cost me much time and trouble. When it was done, the publisher refused to take it, saying that it was not what he wanted. So I lost my labour or oleum perdidi.

I had two young friends named Colton, who had been in the war from the beginning to the end, and experienced its changes to the utmost. Neither was over twenty-one. William Colton, the elder, was a captain in the regular cavalry, and the younger, Baldwin, was his orderly. It was a man in the Captain's company, named Yost, who furnished the type of Hans Breitmann as a soldier. The brothers told me that one day in a march in Tennessee, not far from Murfreesboro', they had found petroleum in the road, and thought it indicated the presence of oil-springs. I mentioned this to Mr. Joseph Lea, a merchant of Philadelphia. He was the father of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, who has since become a very distinguished artist, well known in England, being the first lady painter from whom the British Government ever bought a picture. Mr. Lea thought it might be worth some expense to investigate this Tennessee oil. I volunteered to go, if my expenses were paid, and it was agreed to. It is difficult at the present day to give any reader a clear idea of the dangers and trouble which this undertaking involved, and I was fully aware beforehand what they would be. The place was on the border, in the most disorganised state of society conceivable, and, in fact, completely swarming with guerillas or brigands, sans merci, who simply killed and stripped everybody who fell into their hands. All over our border or frontier there are innumerable families who have kept up feuds to the death, or vendettas, in some cases for more than a century; and now, in the absence of all civil law, these were engaged in wreaking their old grudges without restraint, and assuredly not sparing any stranger who came between them.

I had a friend in C. A. Dana, the Assistant-Secretary of War, and another in Colonel Henry Olcott, since known as the theosophist. The latter had just come from the country which I proposed to visit. I asked him to aid me in getting military passes and introductions to officers in command. He promised to do so, saying that he would not go through what I had before me for all the oil in America. {274} And, indeed, one could not take up a newspaper without finding full proof that Tennessee was at that time an inferno or No-man's Land of disorder.

I went to it with my eyes wide open. After so many years of work, I was as poor as ever, and the seven years of harvest which I had prophesied had come, and I was not gathering a single golden grain. My father regarded me as a failure in life, or as a literary ne'er-do-weel, destined never to achieve fortune or gain an etat, and he was quite right. My war experience had made me reckless of life, and speculation was firing every heart. I bought myself a pair of long, strong, overall boots and blanket, borrowed a revolver, arranged money affairs with Mr. Lea, who always acted with the greatest generosity, intelligence, and kindness, packed my carpet-bag, and departed. It was midwinter, and I was destined for a wintry region, or Venango County, where, until within the past few months, there had been many more bears and deer than human beings. For it was in Venango, Pennsylvania, that the oil-wells were situated, and Mr. Lea judged it advisable that I should first visit them and learn something of the method of working, the geology of the region, and other practical matters.

My brother accompanied me to the station, and I left at about 8 p.m. After a long, long, weary night and day, I arrived at an oil town, whose name I now forget. By great good fortune I secured a room, and by still greater luck I got acquainted the next morning at breakfast with three or four genial and gentlemanly men, all "speculators" like myself, who had come to spy into the plumpness and oiliness of the land. We hired a sleigh and went forth on an excursion among the oil-wells. It was in some respects the most remarkable day I ever spent anywhere.

For here was oil, oil, oil everywhere, in fountains flowing at the rate of a dollar a second (it brought 70 cents a gallon), derricks or scaffoldings at every turn over wells, men making fortunes in an hour, and beggars riding on blooded horses. I myself saw a man in a blue carter's blouse, carrying a black snake-whip, and since breakfast, for selling a friend's farm, he had received 1250,000 as commission (i.e., 50,000 pounds). When we stopped to dine at a tavern, there stood behind us during all the meal many country-fellows, all trying to sell oil-lands; every one had a great bargain at from thirty or forty thousand dollars downwards. The lowest in the lot was a boy of seventeen or eighteen, a loutish-looking youth, who looked as if his vocation had been peddling apples and lozenges. He had only a small estate to dispose of for $15,000 (3,000 pounds), but he was very small fry indeed. My companions met with many friends; all had within a few days or hours made or lost incredible sums by gambling in oil-lands, borrowing recklessly, and failing as recklessly. Companies were formed here on the spot as easily as men get up a game of cards, and of this within a few days I witnessed many instances. Two men would meet. "Got any land over?" (i.e., not "stocked"). "Yes, first-rate; geologer's certificate; can you put it on the market?" "That's my business. I've floated forty oil stocks already, terms half profits." So it would be floated forthwith. Gambling by millions was in the air everywhere; low common men held sometimes thirty companies, all their own, in one pocket, to be presently sprung in New York or elsewhere. And in contrast to it was the utterly bleak wretchedness and poverty of every house, and the miserable shanties, and all around and afar the dismal, dark, pine forests covered with snow.

I heard that day of a man who got a living by spiritually intuiting oil. "Something told him," some Socratic demon or inner impulse, that there was "ile" here or there, deep under the earth. To pilot to this "ile" of beauty he was paid high fees. One of my new friends avowed his intention of at once employing this oil-seer as over-seer.

We came to some stupendous tanks and to a well which, as one of my friends said enviously and longingly, was running three thousand dollars a day in clear greenbacks. Its history was remarkable. For a very long time an engineer had been here, employed by a company in boring, but bore he never so wisely, he could get nothing. At last the company, tired of the expenditure and no returns, wrote to him ordering him to cease all further work on the next Saturday. But the engineer had become "possessed" with the idea that he must succeed, and so, unheeding orders, he bored away all alone the next day. About sunset some one going by heard a loud screaming and hurrahing. Hastening up, he found the engineer almost delirious with joy, dancing like a lunatic round a fountain of oil, which was "as thick as a flour-barrel, and rising to the height of a hundred feet." It was speedily plugged and made available. All of this occurred only a very few days before I saw it.

That night I stopped at a newly-erected tavern, and, as no bed was to be had, made up my mind to sleep in my blanket on the muddy floor, surrounded by a crowd of noisy speculators, waggoners, and the like. I tell this tale vilely, for I omitted to say that I did the same thing the first night when I entered the oil-country, got a bed on the second, and that this was the third. But even here I made the acquaintance of a nice Scotchman, who found out another very nice man who had a house near by, and who, albeit not accustomed to receive guests, said he would give us two one bed, which he did. However, the covering was not abundant, and I, for all my blanket, was a-cold. In the morning I found a full supply of blankets hanging over the foot-board, but we had retired without a light, and had not noticed them. Our breakfast being rather poor, our host, with an apology, brought in a great cold mince-pie three inches thick, which is just the thing which I love best of all earthly food. That he apologised for it indicated a very high degree of culture indeed in rural America, and, in fact, I found that he was a well-read and modest man.

It was, I think, at a place called Plummer that I made the acquaintance of two brothers named B—-, who seemed to vibrate on the summit of fortune as two golden balls might on the top of the oil-fountain to which I referred. One spoke casually of having at that instant a charter for a bank in one pocket, and one for a railroad in the other. They bought and sold any and all kinds of oil-land in any quantity, without giving it a thought. While I was in their office, one man exhibited a very handsome revolver. "How much did it cost?" asked B. "Fifty dollars" (10 pounds). "I wish," replied B., "that when you go to Philadelphia you'd get me a dozen of them for presents." A man came to the window and called for him. "What do you want?" "Here are the two horses I spoke about yesterday." Hardly heeding him, and talking to others, B. went to the window, cast a casual glance at the steeds, and said, "What was it you said that you wanted for them?" "Three thousand dollars." "All right! go and put 'em in the stable, and come here and get the money."

From Plummer I had to go ten miles to Oil City. If I had only known it, one of my very new friends, who was very kind indeed to a stranger, would have driven me over in his sleigh. But I did not know it, and so paid a very rough countryman ten dollars (2 pounds) to take me over on a jumper. This is the roughest form of a sledge, consisting of two saplings with the ends turned up, fastened by cross-pieces. The snow on the road was two feet deep, and the thermometer at zero. But the driver had two good horses, and made good time. I found it very difficult indeed to hold on to the vehicle and also to keep my carpet-bag. Meanwhile my driver entertained me with an account of a great misfortune which had just befallen him. It was as follows:—

"Before this here oil-fever came along I had a little farm that cost me $150, and off that, an' workin' at carpentrin', I got a mighty slim livin'. I used to keep all my main savin's to pay taxes, and often had to save up the cents to get a prospective drink of whisky. Well, last week I sold my farm for forty thousand dollars, and dern my skin ef the feller that bought it didn't go and sell it yesterday for a hundred and fifty thousand! Just like my derned bad luck!"

"See here, my friend," I said; "I have travelled pretty far in my time, but I never saw a country in which a man with forty thousand dollars was not considered rich."

"He may be rich anywhere else with it," replied the nouveau riche contemptuously, "but it wouldn't do more than buy him a glass of whisky here in Plummer."

Having learned what I could of oil-boring, I went to Cincinnati, and then to Nashville by rail. It may give the reader some idea of what kind of a country and life I was coming into when I tell him that the train which preceded mine had been stopped by the guerillas, who took from it fifty Federal soldiers and shot them dead, stripping the other passengers; and that the one which came after had a hundred and fifty bullets fired into it, but had not been stopped. We passed by Mammoth Cave, but at full speed, for it was held by the brigands. All of which things were duly chronicled in the Northern newspapers, and read by all at home.

I got to Nashville. It had very recently been taken by the Federal forces under General Thomas, who had put it under charge of General Whipple, who was, in fact, the ruling or administrative man of the Southwest just then. I went to the hotel. Everything was dismal and dirty—nothing but soldiers and officers, with all the marks of the field and of warfare visible on them—citizens invisible—everything proclaiming a city camp in time of war—sixty thousand men in a city of twenty thousand, more or less. I got a room. It was so cold that night that the ice froze two inches thick in my pitcher in my room.

I expected to find the brothers Colton in Nashville. I went to the proper military authority, and was informed that their regiment was down at the front in Alabama, as was also the officer who had the authority to give them leave of absence. I was also informed that my only chance was to go to Alabama, or, in fact, into the field itself, as a civilian! This was a dreary prospect. However, I made up my mind to it, and was walking along the street in a very sombre state of mind, for I was going to a country like that described in "Sir Grey Stele"—

"Whiche is called the Land of Doubte."

And doubtful indeed, and very dismal and cold and old, did everything seem on that winter afternoon as I, utterly alone, went my way. What I wanted most of all things on earth was a companion. With my brother I would have gone down to the front and to face all chances as if it were to a picnic.

When ill-fortune intends to make a spring, she draws back. But good fortune, God bless her! does just the same. Therefore si fortuna tonat, caveto mergi—if fortune frowns, do not for that despond. Just as I was passing a very respectable-looking mansion, I saw a sign over its office-door bearing the words: "Captain Joseph R. Paxton, Mustering- in and Disbursing Officer."

Joseph R. Paxton was a very intimate friend of mine in Philadelphia. He was still a young man, and one of the most remarkable whom I have ever known. He was a great scholar. He was more familiar with all the rariora, curiosa, and singular marvels of literature than any body I ever knew except Octave Delepierre, with whose works he first made me acquainted. He had translated Ik Marvel's "Reveries of a Bachelor" into French, and had been accepted by a Paris publisher. He had been a lawyer, an agent for a railroad, and had long edited in Philadelphia a curious journal entitled Bizarre, and written a work on gems. His whole soul, however, was in the French literature of the eighteenth century, and he always had a library which would make a collector's mouth water. Had he lived in London or Paris, he would have made a great reputation. And he was kind-hearted, genial, and generous to a fault. He had always some unfortunate friend living on him, some Bohemian of literature under a cloud.

I entered the office and found him, and great was his amazement! "Que diable, mon ami, faistu ici dans cette galere?" was his greeting. I explained the circumstances in detail. He at once exclaimed, "Come and live here with me. General Whipple is my brother-in-law, and he will be here in a few days and live with us. He'll make it all right." "Here, Jim!" he cried to a great six-foot man of colour—"run round to the hotel and bring this gentleman's luggage!"

There I remained for a very eventful month. Paxton had entered with the conquerors, and had just seized on the house. I may indeed say that we seized on it, as regards any right—I being accepted as hail-fellow-well- met, and as a bird of the same feather. In it was a piano and a very good old-fashioned library. It was like Paxton to loot a library. He had had his pick of the best houses, and took this one, "niggers included," for the servants, by some odd freak, preferred freedom with Paxton to slavery with their late owner. This gentleman was a Methodist clergyman, and Paxton found among his papers proofs that he had been concerned in a plot to burn Cincinnati by means of a gang of secret incendiaries.

Whenever the blacks realised the fact that a Northern man was a gentleman—they all have marvellous instincts for this, and a respect for one beyond belief—they took to him with a love like that of bees for a barrel of syrup. I have experienced this so often, and in many cases so touchingly, that I cannot refrain from recording it. Among others who thus took to me was the giant Jim, who was unto Paxton and me as the captive of our bow and spear, albeit an emancipated contraband. When the Southerners defied General Butler to touch their slaves, because they were their "property" by law, the General replied by "confiscating" the property by what Germans call Faustrecht (or fist-right) as "contraband of war."

This Jim, the general waiter and butler, was a character, shrewd, clever, and full of dry humour. When I was alone in the drawing-room of an evening, he would pile up a great wood-fire, and, as I sat in an arm-chair, would sit or recline on the floor by the blaze and tell me stories of his slave life, such as this:—

"My ole missus she always say to me, 'Jim, don' you ever have anything to do with dem Yankees. Dey're all pore miserable wile wretches. Dey lib in poverty an' nastiness and don' know nothin'.' I says to her, 'It's mighty quare, missus. I can't understan' it. Whar do all dem books come from? Master gits em from de Norf. Who makes all our boots an' clothes and sends us tea an' everythin'? Dey can't all be so pore an' ignoran' ef dey writes our books an' makes everythin' we git.' 'Jim,' she says, 'you're a fool, an' don' understan' nothin'.' 'Wery good, missus,' says I, but I thinked it over. All we do is to raise cotton, an' dey make it into cloff, which we hav'n't de sense to do."

I believe that I give this word for word. And Jim, as I found, was a leading mind among the blacks.

I had a letter of introduction from Mr. Lea to Horace Harrison, who was the State Attorney for Tennessee. At this time his power was very great, for he had in his hands the disposition of all the estates of all the rebels in Tennessee. He was the type of a Southwestern gentleman. He reminded me very much of my old Princeton friends, and when I was in his office smoking a pipe, I felt as if I were in college again. I liked him very much. One morning I called, and after some deliberation he said, "You are a lawyer, are you not?" I replied that I had studied law under Judge Cadwallader.

"Then I should like to consult with you as a lawyer. I have a very difficult case to deal with. There is a law declaring that all property belonging to rebels shall be seized and held for one year. Now, here is a man whose estate I have held for six months, who has come in and declared his allegiance, and asks for his lands. And I believe that before long, unless he comes in now, they will be almost ruined. What shall I do?"

"It appears to me," I replied, "that if the disposal of these lands is in your hands, you must be supposed to exert some will and discretion. Stat pro ratione voluntas is a good axiom here. We are not at all in statu quo ante bellum—in fact, the war is not at an end, nor decided. Your duty is to act for the good of the country, and not simply to skin the enemy like a bushwhacker, but to pacify the people. Victor volentes per populos dat jura—laws should always be mildly interpreted. In your case, considering the very critical condition of the country, I should in equity give the man his property, and take his oath of allegiance. Severe measures are not advisable—quod est violentum, non est durabile."

This is, I believe, pretty accurately what I said. That evening, as I was sitting with General Whipple, he amazed me by addressing me exactly as Mr. Harrison had done in the morning.

"I say, Leland, you're a lawyer, and I want your advice. There are six warehouses here, and I want them badly for military stores. But Horace Harrison says that I can't have them, because he holds them for the United States. What am I to do?"

"General Whipple," I replied, "is this town under military occupation in time of war, or is it not?"

"Most decidedly it is."

"So I should think from the way your patrols bother me. And if such is the case, all things must yield to military wants. Where we have no legal principles or courts to decide, we must fall back on legal axioms. And here the law is clear and explicit, for it says, Inter arma leges silent—the laws are suspended in warfare."

"A magnificent saying!" exclaimed the General admiringly. "Ah! you ought to be in the Supreme Court." And seizing a pen he wrote to the State Attorney:—

"SIR: This town, being but recently captured from the enemies of the United States, is, of course, under military occupation, which renders absolutely necessary for military purpose many temporary seizures and uses, such as that of the six warehouses referred to in our late correspondence. As regards legal precedent and principle, I need not remind one of your learning that—(I say, Leland, how do you spell that Latin?—I-n-t-e-r—yes, I've got it)—Inter arma silent leges."

I am afraid that Horace Harrison, when he got that letter, suspected that I had been acting as counsel for both sides. However, as I took no fee, my conscience was at rest. I think that I was of great use to General Whipple at that time, and, as he said one day, an unofficial secretary. Great and serious matters passed through our hands (for the General and Harrison were taking the lead in virtually reforming the whole frontier or debatable land), and these grand affairs were often hurried through "like hot cakes." My slender legal attainments were several times in requisition on occasions when the head of the Supreme Court would have been a more appropriate referee. I discovered, however, that there was really a department of law in which I might have done good work. Questions of very serious importance were often discussed and disposed of among us three with very great economy of time and trouble. And here I may say—"excuse the idle word"—that I wonder that I never in all my life fell into even the most trifling diplomatic or civil position, when, in the opinion of certain eminent friends, I possess several qualifications for such a calling—that is, quickness in mastering the legal bearings of a question, a knowledge of languages and countries, readiness in drawing up papers, and an insatiable love of labour, which latter I have not found to be always possessed by the accomplished gentlemen whom our country employs abroad.

I may here narrate a curious incident which touched and gratified me. When all the slaves in Nashville were set free by the entrance of our troops, the poor souls, to manifest their joy, seized a church (nobody opposing), and for three weeks held heavy worship for twenty-four hours per diem. But not a white soul was allowed to enter—the real and deeply-concealed reason being that Voodoo rites (which gained great headway during the war) formed a part of their devotion. However, I was informed that an exception would be made in my case, and that I was free to enter. And why? Had Jim surmised, by that marvellous intuition of character which blacks possess, that I had in me "the mystery"? Now, to- day I hold and possess the black stone of the Voodoo, the possession of which of itself makes me a grand-master and initiate or adept, and such an invitation would seem as natural as one to a five-o'clock tea elsewhere; but I was not known to any one in Nashville as a "cunjerer," and the incident strikes me as very curious.

Apropos of marvels, many of the blacks can produce in their throats by some strange process sounds, and even airs, resembling those of the harmonicon, or musical box, one or the other or both. One evening in Nashville, in a lonely place, I heard exquisite music, which I thought must be that of a superior hand-organ from afar. But, to my amazement, I could discover none; there were only two black boys in the street. Alexis Paxton, the son of my host, explained to me that what I heard was unquestionably music made by those ebony flutes of boys, and that there were some wonderful performers in the city. I have listened to the same music at a public exhibition. I greatly wonder that I have never heard of this kind of music in Europe or the East. It is distinctly instrumental, not vocal in its tones. It has the obvious recommendation of economy, since by means of it a young lady could be performer and pianoforte all in one, which was indeed the beginning of the invention in Syrinx, who was made into a pan-pipe, which as a piano became the great musical curse (according to Heine) of modern times, and by which, as I conjecture, the fair Miss Reed or Syrinx revenges herself on male humanity. By the way, the best singer of "Che faro senza Euridice" whom I ever heard was a Miss Reed, a sister of Mrs. Paran Stevens.

I had a very pleasant time with Paxton, and I know right well that I was no burden on him, but a welcome friend. Au reste, there was plenty of room in the house, and abundant army stores to be had for asking, and one or two rare acquaintances. One of these was a Southern officer, now a general, who had come over to our side and fought, as the saying was, with a rope round his neck. He was terribly hated by the rebels, which hate he returned with red-hot double compound interest—for a renegade is worse than ten Turks. He was the very type of a grim, calm old Border moss-trooper. He lived in his boots, and never had an ounce of luggage. One evening General Whipple (always humane and cultivated, though as firm as an iron bar) said to him before me, "I really don't know what to do with many of my rebel prisoners. They dress themselves in Federal uniforms for want of other clothes; they take them from the dead on the battlefield, and try to pass themselves off for Federals. It is very troublesome."

"No trouble to me," replied the other.

"And how do you do with them?"

"Shoot them as spies. Why, only last week I got four dozen of them, and in less than four minutes I had them all laid out stiff in the road."

The reader need not imagine that the general here romanced or exaggerated. At that very moment the massacres and murders which were going on within three miles of us were beyond belief. The bands of guerillas or bushwhackers which swept the country murdered in cold blood all who fell into their hands, and the Confederate soldiers often did the same. There resulted, of course, a deadly hatred on both sides, and the most unscrupulous retaliation.

I could fill a book with the very interesting observations which I made in Nashville. And here I call attention to a very strange coincidence which this recalls. During the previous year I had often expressed a great desire to be in some State during its transition from Confederacy to Unionism, that I might witness the remarkable social and political paradoxes and events which would result, and I had often specified Tennessee as the one above all others which I should prefer to visit for this purpose. And I had about as much idea that I should go to the moon as there. But prayers are strangely granted at strange hours—plus impetravi quam fuissem ausus—and I was placed in the very centre of the wheel. This very remarkable fulfilment of a wish, and many like it, though due to mere chance, naturally made an impression on me, for no matter how strong our eyesight may be, or our sense of truth, we are all dazed when coming out of darkness into light, and all the world is in that condition now. No matter how completely we exchange the gloom of supernaturalism for the sunlight of science, phantoms still seem to flit before our eyes, and, what is more bewildering still, we do not as yet know but what these phantoms may be physical facts. Perhaps the Voodoo stone may have the power to awaken the faith which may move the vital or nervous force, which may act on hidden subtler forms of electricity and matter, atoms and molecules. Ah! we have a great deal to learn!

Through General Whipple's kind aid the brothers Colton were at once brought up from the front. With them and Captain Paxton we went to Murfreesboro, and at once called on the general in command, whose name I have forgotten. He struck me as a grim, brave old commander, every inch a soldier. While we conversed with him a sergeant entered, a man who looked as if he lived in the saddle, and briefly reported that a gang of guerillas were assembled at a certain place some miles away—I forget how far, but the distance was traversed in an incredibly short time. The general issued orders for a hundred cavalry to go at once and "get" them. They "got" them, killing many, and the next morning, on looking from my window, I saw the victors ride into the courtyard, many of them with their captives tied neck and heels, like bags of corn, over the cruppers of the horses. A nice night's ride they must have had! But the choice was between death and being cruppered, and they preferred the latter to coming a cropper. Strange that the less a man has to live for the more he clings to life.

The general thought that if he gave us a corporal and four men, and if we were well armed, that we might go out on the Bole Jack road and return unharmed, "unless we met with any of the great gangs of bushwhackers." But he evidently thought, as did General Whipple, who did not heed a trifle by any means, that we were going into the lion's jaws. So the next morning, equo iter ingredi, I rode forth. I had some time before been appointed aide-de-camp to Governor Pollock, of Pennsylvania, with the rank of colonel, and had now two captains and a corporal with his guard. It was a rather small regiment.

We heard grim stories that morning as to what had taken place all around us within almost a few hours. Three Federal pickets had been treacherously shot while on guard the night before; the troops had surprised a gang of bushwhackers holding a ball, and firing through the windows, dropped ten of them dead while dancing; two men had been murdered by —- —- and his gang. This was a noted guerilla, who was said to have gone south with the Confederate army, but who was more generally believed to have remained in hiding, and to have committed most of the worst outrages and murders of late.

At the first house where we stopped in the woods there lay a wounded man, one of the victims of the dance the night before. The inmates were silent, but not rude to us. I offered a man whisky, but he replied, "I don't use it." We rode on. Once there was an alarm of "bushwhackers." I should have forgotten it but for the memory of the look of Baldwin Colton's eyes, the delighted earnestness of a man or of a wild creature going to fight. He and his brother had hunted and fought guerillas a hundred times, perhaps much oftener, for it was a regular daily service at the front. Once during a retreat, Baldwin (eighteen or nineteen years of age) fell out of rank so often to engage in hand-to-hand sword conflicts with rebel cavalrymen, that his brother detached four to take him prisoner and keep him safe. Daring spirits among our soldiers often became very fond of this kind of duelling, in which the rebs were not a whit behind them, and two of the infantry on either side would, under cover of the bushes, aim and pop away at one another perhaps for hours, like two red Indians.

I have forgotten whether it was with extra whisky, coffee, or money that we specially gratified our corporal and guard; but Baldwin, who was "one of 'em," informed me that they enjoyed this little outing immensely, just like a picnic, and had a good time. From which it may be inferred that men's ideas of enjoyment are extremely relative. It could not have been in the dodging of guerillas—to that they were accustomed; perhaps it was the little extra ration, or the mystery of the excursion, for they were much puzzled to know what I wanted, why I examined the road and rocks, and all so strangely, and went into the very worst place in all the land to do so. Baldwin Colton himself had been so knocked about during the war, and so starved as a prisoner in Southern hands, that he looked back on a sojourn in that ergastulum, Libby Prison, as rather an oasis in his sad experiences. "It wasn't so bad a place as some, and there was good company, and always something to eat." The optimist of Candide was a Mallock in mourning compared to this.

That night we came to somebody's plantation. I forget his name, but he was a Union man, probably a very recent acquisition, but genial. He had read the Knickerbocker, and knew my name well, and took good care of us. In the morning I offered him ten dollars for our night's lodging, which was, in the opinion of my two captains, stupendously liberal, as soldiers never paid. Our host declined it like a Southern planter, on the ground that he never sold his hospitality. So I put the money into the hand of one of his pretty children as a present. But as we rode forth we were called back, and reminded that we had forgotten to pay for the soldiers! I gave another five-dollar greenback and rode away disgusted. And at the gate a negro girl begged us to give her a "dalla" (dollar) to buy a fish-line. It all came from my foolish offer to pay. Gratitude is a sense of further benefits to be bestowed.

The place where the oil had been seen was near a conical rocky hill called Grindstone Knob. We examined carefully and found no trace of it. The geology of the country was unfavourable, much flint and conglomerate, if I remember, and wanting in the signs of coal, shales, &c., and "faults" or ravines. I may be quite wrong, but such was my opinion. No one who lived thereabout had ever heard of "ile." Once I asked a rustic if any kind of oil was found in the neighbourhood in springs. His reply was, "What! ile come up outer the ground like water! H—-! I never heard of sitch a thing." There was no oil.

At the foot of Grindstone Knob was a rather neat, small house, white, with green blinds. We were somewhat astonished to learn from a negro boy, who spoke the most astonishingly bad English, that this was the home of Mas' —- —-. Yes, this was the den of the wolf himself, and I had no doubt that he was not far off. There was a small cotton plantation round about.

We entered, and were received by a good-looking, not unladylike, but rather fierce-eyed young woman and her younger sister. It was Mrs. —-. The two had been to a lady's seminary in Nashville, and played the piano for us. I felt that we were in a strange situation, and now and then walked to the window and looked out, listening all the time suspiciously to every sound. It was easy enough for Mrs. —-, the brigand's wife, to perceive from my untanned complexion that I had not been in the field, and was manifestly no soldier. "You look like an officer," she said to Captain Colton, "and so does that one, but what is he?" meaning me by this last. We had dinner—roast kid—and when we departed I gave the dame five dollars, having the feeling that I could not be indebted to thieves for a dinner.

We had gone but a little distance when we saw two bushwhackers with guns, and gave chase, but they disappeared in the bushes, much to the grief of our men, who would have liked either to shoot them or to bring them in. Then the corporal told us that while we were at dinner's "faithful blacks" had informed his men that "Mas' had been at home ever since Crismas"; that at eleven o'clock every night they assembled at the house and thence went out marauding and murdering.

I paused, astonished and angry. It was almost certain that the bushwhacker had been during dinner probably in the cellar under our feet. The guerillas had great fear of our regular soldiers; two of the latter were a match at any time for half-a-dozen of the former, as was proved continually. Should I go back and hang —- up over his own door? I was dying to do it, but we had before us a very long ride through the Cedar Barrens, the sun was sinking in the west, and we had heard news which made it extremely likely that a large band of guerillas would be in the way.

That resolve to go actually saved our lives, for I heard the next day that a hundred and fifty of these free murderers had gone on our road just after us. This fact was at once transferred to the Northern newspapers, that "on —- a hundred and fifty bushwhackers passed over the Bole Jack road." Which was read by my wife and father, who knew that on that very day I was on that road, to their great apprehension.

I never shall forget the dismal appearance of the Cedar Barrens. The soil was nowhere more than two inches deep, and the trees which covered it by millions had all died as soon as they attained a height of fifteen or twenty feet. Swarms of ill-omened turkey-buzzards were the only living creatures visible "like foul lemures flitting in the gloom."

Riding over the battlefield the Coltons and Paxton pointed out many things, for they had all been in it severely. At one place, Major Rosengarten, a brother of my old Paris fellow-student, had had a sabre- fight with a rebel, and they told me how Rosengarten's sword, being one of the kind which was issued by contract in the earlier days of the war, bent and broke like a piece of tin. Hearing a ringing sound Baldwin jumped from his horse, picked up a steel ramrod and gave it to me for a cane.

As we approached Murfreesboro' I met a genial, daring soldier, one Major Hill, whom I had seen before. He had with him a hundred and fifty cavalry. "Where are you going so late by night?" I said.

He replied, "I am after that infernal scoundrel, —- —-. My scouts have found out pretty closely his range. I am going to divide my men into tens and scatter them over the country and then close in."

"Major," I replied, "I will tell you just where to lay your hand at once, heavy on him. Do you know Grindstone Knob and a white house with green windows at its foot?"

"I do."

"Well, be there at exactly eleven to-night, and you'll get him. I have been there and learned it from the niggers."

"Well, I declare that you are a good scout, Mr. Leland!" cried the Major in amazement. "What can I do to thank you?"

"Well, Major Hill," I said, "I have one thing to request: that is, if you get —-, don't parole him. Shoot him at once; he is a red-handed murderer."

"I will shoot him," said the Major, and rode forth into the night with his men. But whether he ever got —- I never knew, though according to the calculations of the Coltons, who were extremely experienced in such matters, "Massa —-" had not more than one chance in a thousand to escape, and Hill was notoriously a good guerilla-hunter and a man of his word.

I believe that at the plantation our men had camped out. At Murfreesboro' we returned them to the general, and I took the Coltons to a hotel, which was so very rough that I apologised for it, while Baldwin said it seemed to him to be luxurious beyond belief, and that it was the first night for eighteen months in which he had slept in a bed. In the morning I wanted a spur, having lost one of mine, and there was brought to me a large boxful of all kinds of spurs to choose from, which had been left in the house at one time or another during the war.

I did not remain long in Nashville after returning thither. I had instructions to go to Louisville, Kentucky, and there consult with a certain merchant as to certain lands. General Whipple accompanied me to the "depot," which was for the time and place as much of an honour as if Her Majesty were to come to see me off at Victoria Station. There was many and many a magnate in those days and there, who would have given thousands to have had his ear as Paxton and I had it.

One night we were in the side private box at the theatre in Nashville. Couldock, whom I had known well many years before, was on the stage. The General was keeping himself deeply in the shade to remain unseen. He remarked to Paxton that he wanted a house for his family, who would soon arrive, and could not find one, for they were all occupied. This one remark shows the man. I wonder how long General Butler would have hesitated to move anybody!

Captain Paxton knew everything and everybody. With a quick glance from his keen dark eyes he exclaimed—

"I've got it! Do you see that fat man laughing so heartily in the pit? He has a splendid house; it would just suit you; and he's a d—-d old rebel. I know enough about him to hang him three times over. He has" (here followed a series of political iniquities). "Voila votre affaire."

"And how is it that he has kept his house?" asked the General.

"He sent the quartermaster a barrel of whisky, or something of that sort."

The General looked thoughtfully at the fat man as the latter burst into a fresh peal of laughter. I thought that if he had known what was being said in our box that laugh would have died away.

I do not know whether the General took the house. I think he did. I left for Louisville. There I saw the great merchant, who invited me to his home to supper and consulted with me. His daughters were rebels and would not speak to me. He had a great deal of property in Indiana, which might be oil-lands. If I would visit it and report on it, he would send his partner with me to examine it. I consented to go.

This partner, Mr. W., was a young man of agreeable, easy manners. With him I went to Indianapolis, and thence by "stages," waggons, or on horseback through a very dismal country in gloomy winter into the interior of the State. I can remember vast marshy fields with millions of fiddler crabs scuttling over them, and more mud than I had ever seen in my life. The village streets were six inches deep in soft mud up to the doors and floors of the houses. At last we reached our journey's end at a large log-house on a good farm.

I liked the good man of the house. He said to us, after a time, that at first he thought we were a couple of stuck-up city fellows, but had found to his joy that we were old-fashioned, sensible people. There was no sugar at his supper-table, but he had three substitutes for it—"tree-sweetnin', bee-sweetnin', and sorghum"—that is, maple sugar, honey, and the molasses made from Chinese maize. Only at a mile's distance there was a "sugar-camp," and we could see the fires and hear the shouts of the people engaged night and day in making sugar from the trees.

He told me that on the hills in sight a mysterious light often wandered. During the Revolutionary war some one had buried a barrelful of silver plate and money, and over it flitted the quivering silver flame, but no one could ever find the spot.

The next day I examined the land. There was abundance of fossiliferous limestone, rich in petrifactions of tertiary shells, also cartloads of beautiful geodes or round flint balls, which often rattled, and which, when broken, were encrusted with white or purple amethystine crystals. I decided that there were places where oil might be found, though there was certainly no indication of it. I believe that my conjecture subsequently proved to be true, and that Indiana has shown herself to be a wise virgin not without oil.

On the afternoon of the next day, riding with my guide, I found that I had left my blanket at a house miles behind. I offered the man a large price to return and bring it, which he did. While waiting by the wood, in a dismal drizzle, I saw a log cabin and went to it for shelter. Its only inmate was a young woman, who, seeing me coming, hastily locked the door and rushed into the neighbouring woods. When the guide returned I expressed some astonishment at the flight; he did not. With a very grave expression he asked me, "Don't the gals in your part of the country allays break for the woods when they see you a-coming?" "Certainly not," I replied. To which he made answer, "Thank God, our gals here hev got better morrils than yourn."

We returned to St. Louis. There I was shown the immensely long tomb of Porter the Kentucky giant. This man was nine feet in height! I had seen him alive long before in Philadelphia. I made several interesting acquaintances in St. Louis, the Athens of the West. But I must hurry on.

I went to Cincinnati, where I found orders to wait for Mr. Lea. A syndicate had been formed in Providence, Rhode Island, which had purchased a great property in Cannelton, West Virginia. This consisted of a mountain in which there was an immense deposit of cannel coal. Cannelton was very near the town of Charleston, which is at the junction of the Kanawha (a tributary of the Ohio) and Elk rivers.

I waited a week at the hotel in Cincinnati for Mr. Lea. It was a weary week, for I had no acquaintances and made none. Never in my life before did I see so many Sardines, or Philistines of the dullest stamp as at that hotel. But at last Mr. Lea came with a party of ladies and gentlemen. A small steamboat was secured, and we went up the Ohio. The voyage was agreeable and not without some incidents. There was a freshet in the river, and one night, taking a short cut over a cornfield, the steamboat stuck fast—like Eve—in an apple-tree.

One day one of the party asked me what was the greatest aggregate deposit of coal known in England. I could not answer. A few hours after we stopped at a town in Kentucky. There I discovered by chance some old Patent Office reports, and among them all the statistics describing the coal mines in England. When we returned to the boat I told my informant that the largest deposit in England was just half that of Cannelton, and added many details. Mr. Lea was amazed at my knowledge. I told him that I deserved no credit, for I had picked it up by chance. "Yes," he replied, "and how was it that you chanced to read that book? None of us did. Such chances come to inquiring minds."

It also chanced that this whole country abounded in signs of petroleum. It was found floating on springs. The company possessed rights of royalty on thousands of acres on Elk River, which was as yet in the debatable land, harassed by rebels. These claims, however, were "run out," and needed to be renewed by signatures from the residents. They were in the hands of David Goshorn, who kept the only "tavern" or hotel in Charleston, and he asked $5,000 for his rights. There was another party in the field after them.

I verily believe that David Goshorn sold the right to me because he played the fiddle and I the guitar, and because he did not like the rival, who was a Yankee, while I was a congenial companion. Many a journey had we together, and as I appreciated him as a marked character of odd oppositions, we got on admirably.

In Cannelton I went down into a coal mine and risked my life strangely in ascending a railway. The hill is 1,500 feet in height, and on its face is a railway which ascends at an angle of 15 degrees, perhaps the steepest in America. I ascended in it, and soon observed that of the two strands of the iron cable which drew it one was broken. The very next week the other broke, and two men were killed by an awful death, they and the car falling a thousand feet to the rocks below.

The next week we returned to Cincinnati, and thence to Philadelphia. On my way from New York to Providence I became acquainted in the train with a modest, gentlemanly man, who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of Thomson who wrote the "Seasons." I thought him both great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat; and among fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his head down, while I sat on his arm and throttled him sans merci—I avow it—and tore off in haste his neckcloth (his neck was frightfully swelled), while Thomson brought cold water from the "cooler," with which we bathed his face freely, and chafed his pulse and forehead. Little by little he recovered. The other passengers, as usual, did nothing, and a little old naval officer, who had been fifty years in service (as Thomson told me), simply kicked and screamed convulsively, "Take him away! take him away!" The epileptic was George Christy, the original founder of the Christy Minstrels. I can never think of this scene without exclaiming, "Vive Thomson!" for he was the only man among us who displayed quiet self-possession and savoir faire. As for me, my "old Injun" was up, and I had "sailed in" for a fight by mere impulse. Vive Thomson! Bon sang ne peut mentir.

I went to Providence, where I was empowered to return to Cannelton to pay Goshorn $5,000, and renew the leases on Elk River. I should have to travel post to anticipate the Yankee. It was not concealed from me that even if I succeeded, I had before me a very dangerous and difficult task. But after what I had already gone through with I was ready for anything. I was really developing rapidly a wild, reckless spirit—the "Injun" was coming out of me. My old life and self had vanished like dreams. Only now and then, in the forests or by torrents, did something like poetry revisit me; literature was dead in me. Only once did I, in a railway train, compose the "Maiden mit nodings on." I bore it in my memory for years before I wrote it out.

I arrived in Philadelphia. The next morning I was to rise early and fly westward. No time to lose. Before I rose, my sister knocked at the door and told us the awful news that President Lincoln had been murdered!

As I went to the station I saw men weeping in the streets, and everybody in great grief, conversing with strangers, as if all had lost a common relation. Everywhere utter misery! I arrived in Pittsburg. It was raining, and the black pall of smoke which always clothes the town was denser than ever, and the long black streamers which hung everywhere as mourning made the whole place unutterably ghastly. In the trains nothing but the murder was spoken of. There was a young man who had been in the theatre and witnessed the murder, which he described graphically and evidently truthfully.

I reached Cincinnati, and as soon as possible hurried on board the steamboat. We went along to Charleston, and it will hardly be believed that I very nearly missed the whole object of my journey by falling asleep. We had but one more very short distance to go, when, overcome by fatigue, I dropped into a nap. Fortunately I was awakened by the last ringing of the bell, and, seizing my carpet-bag, ran ashore just as the plank was to be withdrawn.

I went directly to Goshorn's hotel. He was a stout, burly man, shrewd in his way, good-natured, but not without temper and impulses. He looked keenly after business, played the fiddle, and performed a few tricks of legerdemain. He had a ladylike wife, and both were very kind to me, especially after they came to know me pretty well. The lady had a nice, easy horse, which ere long was lent me freely whenever I wanted to ride. One day it was missing. The master grieved. They had named it after me in compliment. "Goshorn," I said, "in future I shall call you Horse- gone." But he was not pleased with the name. However, it was recovered by a miracle, for the amount of horse-stealing which went on about us then was fabulous.

After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in "ile" bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men and rebels. He could pass the lines and go anywhere. At one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Richmond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go with him into the city! I had a neighbour named Fassit, an uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed the natives. One morning there came to Mr. Fassit a letter imploring him to return: "Come back, o come agin and bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. We dont make war on Ile." And I, being thus respected, went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed if not particularly charming life all winter and the spring, to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will appear in the sequence.

The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and home—with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows liked me. One said to me one day, "You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. What's the reason?" I explained it that he had only met with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the liking which I have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk.

Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. "Money won't be of much use," he said; "what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superstitious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something utterly unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that scrap of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a young raven. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all my life.

During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and we went headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, unless the boatmen know every rock and point, for the dugout canoe goes over at a touch, and there is no life to be saved in the rapids. Now we were flying like a swallow, and could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pass, just in the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an inch for a canoe to pass, but to do this it was necessary to have moonlight enough to see the King Rock, which rose in the stream close by the passage, and at the critical instant to "fend off" with the hand and prevent the canoe from driving full on the rock. A terrible storm was coming up, thunder was growling afar, and clouds fast gathering in the sky.

The men had heard me talking the day before as to how storms were formed in circles, and it had deeply impressed them. When Goshorn asked them what we had better do, they said, "Leave it all to Mr. Leland; he knows everything." I looked at the moon and saw that the clouds were not driving dead against it, but around while closing in, and I know not by what strange inspiration I added, "You will have just time to clear King Rock!"

It was still far away. I laid down my paddle and drew my blanket round me, and smoked to the storm, and sang incantations to myself. It was a fearful trial, actually risking death, but I felt no fear—only a dull confidence in fate. Closer grew the clouds—darker the sky—when during the very last second of light King Rock came in sight. Goshorn was ready with his bull-like strength and gave the push; and just as we shot clear into the channel it became dark as pitch, and the rain came down in a torrent. Goshorn pitched his hat high into the air—aux moulins—and hurrahed and cried in exulting joy.

"Now, Mr. Leland, sing us that German song you're always so jolly with—lodle yodle tol de rol de rol!"

From that hour I was Kchee-Bo-o-in or Grand Pow-wow to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I believe in myself when such mad "spells" come over me. One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and sunshiny, and we were paddling along when we saw a "summer duck" swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting in the bow exactly between me and the duck. "Fire at it with your revolver!" cried Sam.

"It is too far away," I replied, "and you are right in the way."

Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William Tell's at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a feather.

"I knew you'd hit!" cried Sam triumphantly. And so I had, but I should not like to try that shot again.

Reflex action of the brain and secondary automatism! It must be so—Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the "old Injun" and my High- Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the least self-deception or delusion.

It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over so easily, men will pass over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pass over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of canoe was raised.

Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about manna in the wilderness! money in the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill of delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, "Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o' delicacy with us."

Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to live. One day we came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county court for amusement. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of which the poorest English peasant knows something, yet every one of these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty.

One night we stopped at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, "I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like." But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a far higher standard of morals among these people than among the ignorant elsewhere.

It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed me a hill, and a hunter had told him that when standing on it one summer afternoon he had seen in a marshy place the very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all wallowing together in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a bear's claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the time that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his well-furnished table bear's meat, venison, or other game, fish, ham, chickens, &c.

There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk River, and some of its "incidents" were marvellously strange. The hard sandstone rocks had worn into shapes resembling castles and houses, incredibly like buildings made by man. One day I saw and copied a vast square rock through which ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high, with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense square tower. There are the most natural-looking houses and Schlosser imaginable rising all alone in the forest. Very often the summits of the hills were crowned with round towers. On the Ohio River there is a group of these shaped like segments of a truncated cone, and "corniced" with another piece reversed, like this:

{Round tower: p304.jpg}

These are called "Devil's Tea-tables." I drew them several times, but could never give them the appearance of being natural objects. It is very extraordinary how Nature seems to have mocked man in advance in these structures. In Fingal's Cave there is an absolutely original style of architecture.

The last house which we came to was the best. In it dwelt a gentlemanly elderly man with two ladylike daughters. His son, who was dressed in "store clothes," had been a delegate to the Wheeling Convention. But the war had borne hard on them, and for a long time everything which they used or wore had been made by their own hands. They had a home-made loom and spinning-wheel—I saw several such looms on the river; they raised their own cotton and wool and maple sugar, and were in all important details utterly self-sustaining and independent. And they did not live rudely at all, but like ladies and gentlemen, as really intelligent people always can when they are free. The father had, not long before, standing in his own door, shot a deer as it looked over the garden gate at him. Goshorn, observing that I attached some value to the horns (a new idea to him), secured them for himself.

A day or two after, while descending the river, we stopped to see an old hunter who lived on the bank. He was a very shrewd, quaint old boy, "good for a novel." He examined Goshorn's spectacles with so much interest, that I suspect it was really the first time in his life that he ever fully ascertained the "true inwardness and utilitarianism" of such objects. He expressed great admiration, and said that if he had them he could get twice as many deer as he did. I promised to send him a pair. I begged from him deer-horns, which he gave me very willingly, expressing wonder that I wanted such rubbish, and at my delight. And seeing that my companion had a pair, he said scornfully:

"Dave Goshorn, what do you know about such things? What's set you to gittin' deer's horns? Give 'em to this here young gentleman, who understands such things that we don't, and who wants 'em fur some good reason."

I will do Goshorn the justice to say that he gave them to me for a parting present. My room at his house was quite devoid of all decoration, but by arranging on the walls crossed canoe-paddles, great bunches of the picturesque locust-thorn, often nearly a foot in length, and the deer's horns, I made it look rather more human. But this arrangement utterly bewildered the natives, especially the maids, who naively asked me why I hung them old bones and thorns up in my room. As this thorn is much used by the blacks in Voodoo, I suppose that it was all explained by being set down to my "conjurin'."

The maid who attended to my room was a very nice, good girl, but one who could not have been understood in England. I found that she gathered up and treasured many utterly worthless trifling bits of pen-drawing which I threw away. She explained that where she came from on Coal River, anything like a picture was a great curiosity; also that her friends believed that all the pictures in books, newspapers, &c., were drawn by hand. I explained to her how they were made. When I left I offered her two dollars. She hesitated, and then said, "Mr. Leland, there have been many, many gentlemen here who have offered me money, but I never took a cent from any man till now. And I will take this from you to buy something that I can remember you by, for you have always treated me kindly and like a lady." In rural America such girls are really lady- helps, and not "servants," albeit those who know how to get on with them find them the very best servants in the world; but they must be treated as friends.

I went up Elk River several times on horse or in canoe to renew leases or to lease new land, &c. The company sent on a very clever and intelligent rather young man named Sandford, who had been a railroad superintendent, to help me. I liked him very much. We had a third, a young Virginian, named Finnal. At or near Cannelton I selected a spot where we put up a steam-engine, and began to bore for oil. It was very near the famous gas- well which once belonged to General Washington. This well gave forth every week the equivalent of one hundred and fifty tons of coal. It was utilised in a factory. After I sunk our shaft it gave out; but I do not believe that we stopped it, for no gas came into our well. Finnal was the superintendent of the well. One day he nearly sat down—nudo podice—on an immense rattlesnake. He had a little cottage and a fine horse. He kept the latter in a stable and painted the door white, so that when waking in the night he could see if any horse-thief had opened it. Many efforts were made to rob him of it.

At this time Lee's army was disbanded, and fully one-half came straggling in squads up the valley to Charleston to be paroled. David Goshorn's hotel was simply crammed with Confederate officers, who slept anywhere. With these I easily became friends; they seemed like Princeton Southern college mates. Now I have to narrate a strange story. One evening when I was sitting and smoking on the portico with some of these bons compagnons I said to one—

"People say that your men never once during the war got within sight of Harrisburg or of a Northern city. But I believe they did. One day when I was on guard I saw five men scout on the bank in full sight of it. But nobody agreed with me."

The officer laughed silently, and cried aloud to a friend with a broken arm in a sling, who lay within a room on a bed, "Come out here, L—-. Here is something which will interest you more than anything you ever heard before."

He came out, and, having heard my story, said—

"Nobody ever believed your story, nor did anybody ever believe mine. Mine is this—that when we were at Sporting Hill a corporal of mine came in and declared that he and his men had scouted into within full sight of Harrisburg. I knew that the man told the truth, but nobody else would believe that any human being dared to do such a thing, or could do it. And now you fully prove that it was done."

There came to Goshorn's three very interesting men with whom I became intimate. One was Robert Hunt, of St. Louis. He was of a very good Virginia family, had been at Princeton College, ran away in his sixteenth year, took to the plains as a hunter, and for twenty-three years had ranged the Wild West from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. At the end of the time an uncle in the Fur Company had helped him on, and he was now rich. He was one of the most genial, gay, and festive, reckless yet always gentlemanly men I ever knew. He expressed great astonishment, as he learned gradually to know me, at finding we were so congenial, and that I had so much "real Injun" in me. His eyes were first opened to this great fact by a very singular incident, of which I can never think without pleasure.

Hunt, with two men who had been cavalry captains all through the war, and his friend Ross, who had long been an Indian trader, and I, were all riding up Elk Valley to look at lands. We paused at a place where the road sloped sideways and was wet with rain. As I was going to remount, I asked a German who stood by to hold my horse's head, and sprang into the saddle. Just at this critical instant—it all passed in a second—as the German had not heard me, my horse, feeling that he must fall over on his left side from my weight, threw himself completely over backward. As quick as thought I jumped up on his back, put my foot just between the saddle and his tail, and took a tremendous flying leap so far that I cleared the horse. I only muddied the palms of my gloves, on which I fell.

The elder cavalry captain said, "When I saw that horse go over backwards, I closed my eyes and held my breath, for I expected the next second to see you killed." But Robert Hunt exclaimed, "Good as an Injun, by God!" And when I some time after made fun of it, he shook his head gravely and reprovingly, as George Ward did over the gunpowder, and said, "It was a magnificent thing!"

That very afternoon Hunt distinguished himself in a manner which was quite as becoming an aborigine. I was acting as guide, and knowing that there was a ford across a tributary of the Elk, sought and thought I had found it. But I was mistaken, and what was horrible, we found ourselves in a deep quicksand. On such occasions horses become, as it were, insane, trying to throw the riders and then jump on them for support. By good luck we got out of it soon, but there was an awful five minutes of kicking, plunging, splashing, and "ground and lofty" swearing. I got across dry by drawing my legs up before me on the saddle, a la tailor, but the others were badly wet. But no sooner had we emerged from the stream than Robert Hunt, bursting into a tremendous "Ho! ho!" of deep laughter, declared that he had shown more presence of mind during the emergency than any of us; for, brandishing his whisky flask, he declared that while his horse was in the flurry it occurred to him that the best thing he could do was to lighten the load, and he had therefore, with incredible presence of mind, drunk up all the whisky!

However, he afterwards confessed to me that the true reason was that, believing death was at hand, and thinking it a pity to die thirsty, he had drained the bottle, as did the old Indian woman just as she went over the Falls of Niagara. Anyhow, the incorrigible vaurien had really emptied his flask while in the "quick."

Though I say it, I believe that Hunt and I were a pretty well matched couple, and many a wild prank and Indian-like joke did we play together. More than once he expressed great astonishment that I, a man grown up in cities and to literary pursuits, should be so much at home where he found me, or so congenial. He had been at Princeton, and, ex pede Herculem, had a point whence to judge me, but it failed. {309} His friend Ross was a quiet, sensible New Englander, who reminded me of Artemus Ward, or Charles Browne. He abounded in quaint anecdotes of Indian experiences.

As did also a Mr. Wadsworth, who had passed half his life in the Far West as a surveyor among the Chippeways. He had written a large manuscript of their legends, of which Schoolcraft made great use in his Algic book. I believe that much of Longfellow's Hiawatha owed its origin thus indirectly to Mr. Wadsworth. In after years I wrote out many of his tales, as told to me, in articles in Temple Bar.

The country all about Charleston was primitively wild and picturesque, rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and dreams of sylvani and forest fairies. There were fountained hills, and dreamy darkling woods, and old Indian graves, and a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other hand could "shoot their mark" with a rifle to perfection, and who would assuredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy messenger of Ile, and an angel of coming moneyed times.

One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. There was only an old woman there—one of the stern, resolute, hard-muscled frontier women, the daughters of mothers who had fought "Injuns"—and a calf. And thereby hung a tale, which the three men with me fully authenticated.

The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so worried, harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by Federals and Confederates—one day the former, the next the latter; blue and grey, or sky and sea—that the old lady had nothing left to live on. Hens, cows, horses, corn, all had gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her heart.

One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a broom, rushed to the now henless hen-house, in which she kept the calf, to find in it a full- grown panther attacking her pet. By this time the old lady had grown desperate, and seizing the broom, she proceeded to "lam" the wild beast with the handle, and with all her heart; and the fiend of ferocity, appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the marks of the panther's claws, not yet quite healed; I saw the broom; and, lastly, I saw the old woman, the mother in Ishmael; whose face was a perfect guarantee of the truth of the story. One of us suggested that the old lady should have the calf's hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an Indian, which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare's application of it, or to