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 .H255 
 B7 
 1910 
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THE BREED AND 
 THE PASTURE 
 
 BY 
 
 J. LENOIR CHAMBERS 
 
 Cfjarlotte, M. C: 
 
 STONE & BARRINGER COMPANY 
 
 19 10 
 

 COPYRIGHT 1910 
 By J. IvENOIR CHAMBERS 
 
 /Besses Observer Printins House (Jnc.) Charlotte, N. C. 
 
 (gCl.A25G10J) 
 
JP 
 
 a ODfjfe little tjoofe, tufjicfi 
 fjasi been to me a labor 
 of lobe, 3 trebicate to 
 mp cfjilbren 
 
The Breed and the Pasture 
 
 MY BLUE MOUNTAINS ONCE MORE 
 
 ijjR)jO MANY of those who are engaged in 
 )^\ the active and exacting work of modern 
 business life there comes a time when 
 it seems necessary to lay down the burden, 
 for a brief period at least, and escape to differ- 
 ent surroundings. Under these conditions one 
 turns to quiet places, to green woods, to lazy 
 villages. After resisting for weeks this 
 demand of nature for rest, I announced to 
 my family, one hot July evening, that I was 
 going away the next morning. Where? I 
 didn't know and didn't much care; I only 
 knew that I wanted to go to the mountains. 
 I was born in the mountains, and the pictures 
 of rest that I had recently allowed myself to 
 draw were all surrounded by the blue haze 
 which covers their distant sides and peaks. 
 I recalled that the occasional glimpses of 
 them I had caught from car windows always 
 revived my spirits as nothing else did except 
 
6 The Breed cmd The Pasture. 
 
 the refreshing breezes that came through these 
 same car windows from their hazy tops. 
 
 At the station I would have to decide where 
 I should go — but I didn't. I took a looo-mile 
 ticket and left the question open. It seemed 
 just then as if I hadn't done anything but 
 decide things since I was a boy — that respon- 
 sibility which I never sought had always been 
 thrust upon me. After all, it is the man who 
 must say yes or no — on whom the real burden 
 rests, and those who easily and quickly fix 
 the dates and directions of their personal move- 
 ments have generally put themselves before 
 their work. At all events, I satisfied myself 
 with this reflection. There was a transfer to 
 be made, so I settled nothing when the con- 
 ductor came around except my own body in 
 a comfortable seat. 
 
 For that form of restless endeavor which 
 comes from the habit of work and urges on 
 the tired brain and nerves I know of noth- 
 ing so soothing as a ride in a railway train, 
 for under no other conditions can one sit so 
 still or think so little, unless, of course, it is 
 
My Blue Mountains Once More. 7 
 
 one of these little trips a business man takes 
 with a distinct object to be accomplished at 
 the journey's end. I had no object and no 
 destination, as yet, and so I let myself drift. 
 I had travelled over that road many times 
 as a boy, and the memories of those days came 
 trooping back, carrying me to the little town 
 in which I had spent my boyhood — a sleepy, 
 restful place. I remembered an old hotel with 
 a long porch surrounded by trees, and with a 
 little low banister in front. On this porch 
 I had seen men sit for hours and talk, and 
 when the next conductor came around I asked 
 him to "pull" my mileage for Evanston. 
 
 The remainder of the journey was spent in 
 going over the scenes and incidents of thirty 
 years before and picturing myself on that 
 porch doing absolutely nothing, and I was 
 more contented than I had been for a year. 
 I fell to wondering if there would be any 
 hack at the station, or if I should have to take 
 that long hot walk I thought I remembered 
 so well. 
 
 There was a hack, or rather "the bus." A 
 
8 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 smiling porter with a cap bearing the letters 
 '^Minnehaha Inn" took my suit case and dis- 
 appeared. As there was no driver in the seat, 
 I waited on the outside and was looking at 
 ''the bus," thinking that of all the vehicles 
 ever constructed for the transportation of 
 man it was the most uncomfortable. 
 
 "Rather an ancient carriage, that," said a 
 man near by, whom I had not seen. He was 
 dressed in a neat brown linen suit that looked 
 as if it had been ironed many times, a panama 
 hat of the same age and a narrow black cra- 
 vat. "It came to us when the railroad was 
 built forty years ago. Isn't that true, Jim- 
 mie?" 
 
 The question was directed to a young man 
 with bright eyes who looked as if he might 
 be the station agent. 
 
 "My father told me," said the young man, 
 after a long pause, "that his grandfather built 
 the railroad from New York to Philadelphia 
 and that same "bus" met the first train that 
 came in, and has been doin' business at the 
 head of the road ever since. It got hung up 
 
My Blue Mountains Once More. 9 
 
 here during the war for repairs. After the 
 surrender, Bill Hennessee, the blacksmith, 
 wrote to New York to get a door fastening 
 for it, and the man he wrote to said there 
 hadn't been a ''bus" factory in this country 
 since the Mexican war. It was a curious 
 letter that fellow wrote. He said the man 
 who built the first one of them got his idea 
 of a nice comfortable thing to ride in from a 
 combination of a gun carriage with the pic- 
 tures of the chariots the Egyptians used in 
 their pursuit of the Israelites." 
 
 Turning to me with a countenance that 
 hadn't changed in the least, he continued: 
 ''Why, wherever the Confederate veterans 
 meet, they hire that "bus" and trot around 
 town all day because the rattle of the win- 
 dows reminds them of the battle of Seven 
 Pines. Fact, ain't it Counsellor?" nodding 
 towards the brown linen suit. 
 
 ''Ah, Jimmie, my boy; at your old tricks 
 again. Why, here come the Misses Mary 
 and Alice. Aleck, we will have several pas- 
 
lo The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 sengers. I'll ride up with you myself," he told 
 the porter. 
 
 The Misses Mary and Alice, blonde and 
 brunette, with pink cheeks, were coming 
 around the corner. 
 
 "Of course you are going to the Minne- 
 haha," said the one Jimmie had called Coun- 
 sellor, addressing me. "It's the pride of our 
 town, sir." 
 
 I said, no, I intended to stop at Harbin's 
 Hotel. The young ladies heard this and gave 
 me a glance in which I thought I saw signs 
 of pity. I caught a second glance, this time 
 of inspection from the toes of my shoes up- 
 ward, missing my face, apparently, certainly 
 skipping my eyes, and resting on my hat. 
 For the first time I remembered I had on 
 clothes, but — they were good clothes. I some- 
 how became conscious that there was a pause. 
 The "bus" door was open and Aleck was 
 apparently about to say "all aboard," but he 
 didn't. Then one of the young ladies had 
 business with Aleck off to the side. I heard 
 the word Minnehaha. The counsellor did. 
 
My Blue Mountains Once More ii 
 
 too, and one of the girls gave him that kind 
 of a look which young men don't always 
 understand but which older ones know is a 
 summons. He joined them and there was 
 a ccnference. Then they all came towards 
 the door of "the bus." The blond young lady 
 was saying with some animation, "I saw Mrs. 
 Allen yesterday. She said they had a most 
 delightful company at the Minnehaha. ''Mr. 
 Gates," to the counsellor, "speak out; do you 
 know of a nicer little hotel anywhere?" To 
 which question Mr. Gates replied: "It is 
 really a charming place for one seeking a little 
 rest and recreation, — " Before he had fin- 
 ished there was a whoop and a slam and a 
 loud cracking of a whip, and then began the 
 rehearsal of the Battle of Seven Pines. 
 
 We had scarcely gone a block when there 
 was a sharp clang of a bell from the driver's 
 seat, and a sudden halt. The face of Aleck, 
 who was standing on the steps, ceased to 
 shoot up and down to heights and depths equal 
 to the length of his body, and he said to me. 
 
12 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 "Did you say it were Harbin's Hotel you 
 wanted ter go?" I nodded assent. 
 
 ''Harbin's Hotel," he called out in a tone 
 which had in it pity and despair. All the 
 other passengers gave me another little stare, 
 and then turned to look out of the window, 
 except Jimmie, who smiled. We made a sharp 
 turn, and the rattle of musketry was resumed. 
 
 When I left the ''bus" at Harbin's I felt 
 like bowing to my new made friends, but I 
 parted from them without doing so. I knew 
 I should see them all again very soon. The 
 truth is I knew just what these people were 
 thinking, as they knew, or thought they knew, 
 I had no business stopping at Harbin's. Was I 
 not born in that town, albeit many years be- 
 fore? I remembered Mr. Gates well. They 
 called him Counsellor then, as now. He was 
 one of the beaux of the town and "came out" 
 year after year with the young ladies whose 
 mothers he had escorted to aances. As for 
 the girls, I was sure one was a Foster and 
 the other a Williams. I even located "Jim- 
 mie" as a member of one of two families, per- 
 
My Blue Mountains Once More. 13 
 
 haps both. It was, therefore, no surprise that 
 ''Jimmie" discovered as I left the *'bus" that 
 he had business with the proprietor. Incident- 
 ally, he investigated the hotel register, as I 
 knew he would, and whistled low when there 
 was no name there. I had handed the pro- 
 prietor a bill, with the statement that I would 
 be around for a few days and had reasons 
 for not registering. 
 
 I had come to Harbin's to sit on that porch 
 unmolested for as many days as I felt in- 
 clined, and I didn't purpose that Jimmie or 
 the girls or the Counsellor should spread the 
 news of my presence to my relatives and old 
 friends. Evanston might have changed in 
 many respects, but not in its hospitable atti- 
 tude to visitors, even though they were 
 strangers. 
 
 My suit case was sent above, but I didn't 
 follow. I wanted to sit on that porch with 
 my feet on the banisters, and this I did at 
 once. But before my eyes could follow the 
 rugged outline of a horizon made up wholly 
 of blue mountains, I heard footsteps approach- 
 
14 The Breed and The Pasture, 
 
 ing. They were ''yimmit's,'' of course. I 
 didn't have to look to that side to know that, 
 or to go into the office a moment before to 
 overhear a conversation with the proprie- 
 tor, who knew nothing except that I had paid 
 my bill in advance, and he couldn't tell if I 
 was a lawyer, preacher, traveling man or 
 special revenue officer from Washington — 
 most likely the last named. 
 
 "Jimmie" drew up a chair ten feet away 
 and lit his pipe. 
 
m 
 
 IN THE SMOKE OF MY NEIGHBORS* 
 PIPE 
 
 HEN Jimmie seated himself at an 
 unobstrusive distance and lit his pipe, 
 I knew that sooner or later we would 
 be talking, and before he left he would find 
 out all he wanted to know. Patience is the 
 cardinal virtue of the dwellers in small towns, 
 and knowledge, that is to say, satisfied curi- 
 osity, is one of the chief rewards. I wanted 
 to smoke myself, but I knew if I but struck 
 a match as evidence of my intention, it would 
 give James his chance. It is one of the inci- 
 dental charms of Lady Nicotine that two men 
 will sit for hours near each other on a rail- 
 way train, for instance, without any commun- 
 ication, and the moment they meet in the 
 smoking room, conversation will begin. The 
 appearance of an odd-looking character, or 
 the passing of a mixed team, horse and ox, 
 from the mountains, or any trivial occurrence 
 on the sereet would give my companion his 
 chance, but there were no such sights or 
 sounds. A noon-day stillness had settled upon 
 
i6 The Breed and the Pasture. 
 
 everything except the restless aspens over- 
 head which were kissing their thousands of 
 little green hands to the breezes from my 
 blue mountains — breezes and mountains that 
 I had come there to feel and see again from 
 this old porch. God bless and keep them both 
 for the rest and the strength and the hope 
 they bring to such as I, for the velvet pink 
 and brown they have brought to so many 
 cheeks of the youth of Evanston, for the 
 power they have given to the nerves and 
 brains of men and women who have gone out 
 from these foot-hills to fill the falling ranks 
 of those who, in cities and factories, in labor- 
 atories and counting rooms, are giving their 
 lives to the building up of this greatest of all 
 Republics. 
 
 It is no new thing to say that the great 
 things of the world have been done by those 
 who came from the hill country, and I would 
 like to live to see the day when the grandsons 
 and great-grandsons of those who left the 
 Piedmont region of the South in search of the 
 alluvial soils and rich mines of the great West, 
 
In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. ly 
 
 shall return to the homes of their ancestors 
 and grow a race the like of which has never 
 yet been seen on this earth. 
 
 I have often heard it said that this partic- 
 ular town of Evanston has been known far 
 and wide for the beauty and the charm of its 
 women, but less was heard of the men who 
 lived there — that while other towns had 
 advanced in population and wealth, Evanston 
 had changed but little, notwithstanding a 
 most stimulating climate and a location as 
 favorable as many others. Knowing the 
 stock from which its people came to be of the 
 best American type, and that there had been 
 no lack of education of the best the Southern 
 country then afforded, I found myself in 
 instant pursuit of the cause, following meth- 
 ods which I had learned in my thirty years 
 of business training. 
 
 Because I found the facts concerning the 
 settlement of this community of more than 
 usual historical interest, the degree of intel- 
 ligence that prevailed much above the average 
 i.i the State, and because I thought I saw that 
 
i8 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 this community really represented one of per- 
 haps a dozen different types or modifications 
 of a civilization that went to make up South- 
 ern life as it existed before the civil war, I 
 decided to set down the facts as I found them, 
 and hence the origin of the Sketches of Evans- 
 ton. 
 
 Fortunately for the ease and comfort of 
 the undertaking, I was old enough to have 
 lived, or at least to have spent my boyhood 
 days, in this community under the conditions 
 that culminated in 1861. I knew every house 
 of consequence in the county, and the bold 
 outlines, if not the fine points, of each repre- 
 sentative family, and many of the individual 
 members. Even then as I sat on the long low 
 porch of Harbin's Hotel by the end of which 
 the children were passing, I was sure I could 
 see family resemblances that were unmistak- 
 able. A young man with the high cheek 
 bones, brown eyes and confident carriage of 
 the Carters entered and passed into the office, 
 but as he spoke there were the unmistakable 
 tones of the Pinsons — the hands of Esau but 
 
In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 19 
 
 the voice of Jacob. "Ji^i"^!^" called him Car- 
 ter, and a moment later the proprietor said: 
 "Good morning, Pinson," and I knew there 
 had been a marriage between the Carter and 
 Pinson families. 
 
 In some respects, surely, there is more in 
 the breed than there is in the pasture, and yet 
 I already saw in the picture I hoped to be 
 able to paint that it was lack of pasture and 
 narrowness of range which had kept back 
 development, or produced a one-sided growth, 
 where the breed was exceptional and the cli- 
 matic conditions unsurpassed. 
 
 And thus it came to pass that while I had 
 gone to sit on the porch of Harbin's Hotel 
 in idleness, thinking thereby to drown the 
 voice of factory wheels and dull the keen edge 
 of nerves which had been cutting to the quick, 
 I found myself alive with a desire to wrestle 
 with a problem which led into history, and the 
 wider field of economic subjects affecting our 
 life and growth as a state and a nation. If 
 this town hadn't grown, why? What is 
 growth, anyway? Surely not the mere accu- 
 
20 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 mulation of wealth; and yet, for the lack of 
 it, fine talents were going to waste for want 
 of opportunity, and the greater the native 
 strength and the more restless the energy, the 
 more danger of discouragement, despair and 
 dissipation. For the men there was only a 
 limited amount of professional work, or poli- 
 tics, or — emigration. 
 
 With the women it was different. They 
 had their homes and they made the best of 
 them and of themselves. Abject poverty in 
 the midst of wealth may coarsen and harden 
 a woman, but universal narrowness of means 
 but sharpen her wits and stimulates her to 
 make herself and her home attractive. 
 Especially is this true if she has back of her 
 the memory of better days, and in her the con- 
 sciousness of being well bred. It was a matter 
 of common knowledge that when a young man 
 from the outside world drifted into Evans- 
 ton, and was fortunate enough to meet the 
 young women of the town, which was not 
 always easy unless he came well accredited, 
 he was invariably fascinated, and if, as occa- 
 
In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 21 
 
 sionally did happen, he succeeded in carrying 
 away one of them as his bride, he spent the 
 remainder of his days wondering where and 
 how she acquired the grace and ease of man- 
 ner that enabled her to shine in the best society 
 of the land. 
 
 With these reflections in mind, I turned to 
 my patient companion and said, ''If I am 
 not mistaken this is Mr. Wilcox," and giving 
 him my name, I told him frankly that I had 
 come there for a week's rest, having been 
 born near Evanston, and that I was sure he 
 could tell me things of interest about the 
 people, many of whom I had known. 
 
 He heard his own name called without show- 
 ing the least sign of surprise, and listened to 
 my explanation as if it was what he expected 
 to find out when he took a seat near me. 
 
 "The women run this town," he said with 
 that twinkle in his eye I had seen at the rail- 
 way station. "Yes, the women run it. Was 
 it that way when you lived here?" 
 
 I said that, come to think of it, they did 
 handle the reins to some extent. 
 
22 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 "In one of the churches," he went on to 
 say, "they can't take up the collection when 
 the river is high." 
 
 Noting my puzzled look, he paused and 
 pulled at his pipe, and finally added, "Because 
 the only deacon they have lives on the other 
 side in the country, and the bridge has been 
 washed away." 
 
 Another long pull at the pipe, and then, 
 "You've heard about our map." 
 
 "Your map? No, I think not." 
 
 "Well, nobody I know of ever saw it, but 
 they say there is a map which has a white spot 
 on it that covers the town of Evanston, and 
 it is the only white spot on the whole map of 
 the United States." 
 
 By this time the pipe had gone out and had 
 to be refilled and lighted, a process which, in 
 deliberate hands, takes time. At last he 
 drawled between his teeth : "It means that 
 no case of consumption ever originated here. 
 Bill Hennessee, the blacksmith, says," and 
 there was a faint smile in the corners of his 
 mouth as he continued, "Bill says it always 
 
In tJie Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 23 
 
 appears to him like there is more consumption 
 around Evanston than there is production, and 
 that's the reason everybody is so poor." 
 
 Seeing that my companion was in the mood 
 to talk, and was painting, with the brush of a 
 gentle satirist the very picture of the good 
 old town that I wished to get, I was careful 
 not to interrupt his pauses. The best listen- 
 ers never interrupt a pause. 
 
 ''It's hard to get anybody about here to ad- 
 mit that any sickness ever starts here," resum- 
 ed Mr. Wilcox. "It would ruin our biggest 
 asset. All the new folks that come to Evans- 
 ton are brought here on that account. People 
 will do strange things for health — go anywhere 
 and drink water by the gallon if it tastes bad 
 and smells like a drug store. When they first 
 come, they start out to show us a thing or 
 two about building up a town and all that, but 
 after awhile you can't tell 'em from the rest 
 of the folks. Two old ladies came in last 
 year who seemed to have plenty of money, 
 and told the preacher and the doctor they 
 wanted to lead a very quiet life. But the 
 
24 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 ladies all called on them, and in a week they 
 were going out to teas and book clubs and 
 giving teas themselves. Now they never 
 spend a whole day at home without company. 
 For every man that moves off to some other 
 town, we get two women and a half a man, 
 and so we keep a-growing some." 
 
 There was another pause, but this I began 
 to understand was a way Mr. Wilcox had of 
 making his paragraphs. Then again, "You 
 saw how put out those girls were with you 
 because you came here instead of going to the 
 Minnehaha Inn. I figured out that you hadn't 
 been in Evanston in a long time, or else you 
 didn't want anybody to know you were here. 
 Still, I knew you must know something about 
 this town, for nobody would have told you 
 to stop at Harbin's." 
 
 This was a new road "Jimmie" was start- 
 ing out on, but I saw whither it was leading. 
 I had surprised him when I called him Mr. 
 Wilcox, although there was no trace of it 
 in his face. If his curiosity on that point 
 were satisfied, he would go on talking about 
 
/n the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe. 25 
 
 present conditions in Evanston. If not, he 
 would begin to ply me with adroit and indirect 
 questions, and so I told him that I had been 
 greatly interested in tracing the family resem- 
 blances I had seen in the short time I had been 
 there, that I had made a venture when I 
 called him by name, and that I was sure the 
 two young ladies belonged to the Williams 
 and Foster families. 
 
 This statement had the desired effect of 
 inducing him to continue to talk about his own 
 place and people, and he straightaway began 
 again. 
 
 I do not know how much longer my com- 
 panion would have continued to talk about 
 his town in that form of humor which com- 
 bines extravagance of statement with just 
 enough of the element of surprise to save it, 
 but he was interrupted by the sound of the 
 dinner bell — the tavern bell which was hung 
 on a small tower in the rear of the dining 
 room, and could be heard all over town. It 
 had stood there for fifty years on the same 
 four legs, and announced the exact hour at 
 
26 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 which the guests of Harbin's took their three 
 meals. A later and rival hotel built nearer 
 the center of population, which is the same as 
 saying nearer the court house, used a gong. 
 The voluminous quantity and excruciating 
 quality of noise which a jet black negro was 
 able to extract from that insignificant piece 
 of sheet metal, had filled my boyish soul with 
 envy. I could remember the day when I 
 would rather have played on that instrument 
 than any other in this world with single excep- 
 tion of the steam piano of the circus. 
 
 Harbin's and that other hotel were, how- 
 ever, alike in one particular — a certain archi- 
 tectural appendage in the way of a row of 
 one-story "offices," more or less extended 
 according to the patronage of the hostlery, 
 with a narrow balcony running the full length 
 of the building. The almost universal exist- 
 ence of this appendage to all taverns in old 
 towns in the South is proof of the fact that 
 the tavern depended, in the older days, almost 
 entirely upon the patronage of lawyers who 
 followed the Court as it moved from county 
 
In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe 2.y 
 
 to county. In those rooms, accessible to the 
 street, counsel and client could meet, and 
 hence they are to this day referred to as offi- 
 ces. Some of them that housed Andrew- 
 Jackson may be yet standing, for it was in 
 this section where the impetuous, headstrong 
 young lawyer began the practice of his pro- 
 fession, and in this very town of Evanston 
 lived another distinguished lawyer with whom 
 he fought his first duel — or rather went out 
 to the field of honor to redress a fancied 
 wrong, for there was no fight. His opponent, 
 an older and more self-contained character, 
 discharged his pistol in the air, and then 
 turned upon Jackson and read him a lecture 
 on his high temper and uncontrolable behav- 
 ior. 
 
 I have spoken of the noon-day stillness in 
 Evanston. This was not comparable to the 
 stillness of the afternoon, and I recalled that 
 it was a custom of the inhabitants, widely 
 prevalent, to follow the habits of the residents 
 of warmer climates, and indulge themselves in 
 a siesta — not on Sundays alone, but every day 
 
28 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 in the week. It is true that there was noth- 
 ing in the cUmate of this piedmont town to 
 justify it, but the custom had been begun 
 when there was little need to work, and con- 
 tinued when there was little work to do. 
 
 That a state of undress and bodily relaxa- 
 tion dulled the intellectual activity of the peo- 
 ple of Evanston there had never been any 
 evidence. What philosophers they were, after 
 all ! If we never stop to think, we rarely think 
 to advantage, and if so it be that our reflec- 
 tions lead us gently off into dreamland, our 
 souls come back thence restored and calmed. 
 Of what good is undigested knowledge, 
 whether gathered from books, from observa- 
 tion or from close touch with men and 
 affairs ? 
 
 I had lately sat at a banquet with a man 
 who had come as a messenger from the great 
 center of finance to sound a note of warning 
 to his fellows in the South. He gave them 
 the facts — showed them the needs, but had no 
 remedy. Later in the evening, after hearing 
 their calm talk and looking long into their 
 
In the Smoke of My Neighbors' Pipe 29 
 
 quiet faces, he arose the second time and said, 
 ''Gentlemen, the remedy must come to the 
 nation through you who have time to think. 
 We of the North are too busy providing 
 against the Hghtning-hke changes of the hour." 
 
 A moment later, with his eyes still turned 
 towards the faces on either side of the table, 
 he said, as if partly talking to himself, that 
 if he could concentrate the thought of these 
 men gathered from the adjoining towns, 
 the financial difficulties under which he felt 
 the country was then struggling, could be set- 
 tled on a just and equitable basis. 
 
 These and other reflections had come to me 
 that afternoon when, following the example 
 of the fine Romans in whose Rome I found 
 myself, I had withdrawn my eyes from moun- 
 tains and streets, my ears from the sounds of 
 men's voices, and relaxed the strings we un- 
 consciously keep taut to catch from every 
 passing breeze whatever may help us in the 
 struggles of a busy life. 
 
A HUMAN PRODUCT OF THE HILLS 
 
 S THE SUN drew nearer the tops of 
 the western mountains the streets be- 
 gan to show some signs of Hfe. My 
 acquaintance of the earlier part of the day, 
 the counsellor, dropped in, as I supposed, to 
 discover the name and business of the stran- 
 ger who chose to stop at Harbin's, but instead 
 he came straight up to me and abased himself 
 for not recognizing me in the morning. "Jim- 
 mie" had spread the news. 
 
 A moment later a buggy, drawn by an 
 ancient looking horse, stopped and a splendid 
 specimen of mountain manhood, dressed in 
 Norfolk jacket, alighted and tossed the lines to 
 a small colored boy who seemed to have come 
 up out of the ground. 
 
 As soon as the young man turned his face 
 towards me I knew he was a son of Judge 
 Arnold. I think I knew that by the way his 
 mustache grew. At all events, I was sure 
 I had made no mistake. He came forward 
 with easy grace and confidence, and, inclin- 
 ing his head to my companion the "Coun- 
 
^2 The Breed and The Pasture, 
 
 sellor," stopped in front of me, and calling 
 my name and his own, he immediately pro- 
 ceeded to tell me that his father, the Judge, 
 had commissioned him to come and bring me, 
 bag and baggage, to their home. The same 
 old prompt and cordial hospitality, bred in 
 the bone of the good people of Evanston — 
 natural and therefore irresistible! Indeed it 
 is true that "The glory of the house is hos- 
 pitality." 
 
 Four years before the time I first saw Elli- 
 son Arnold a North Carolinian had been ap- 
 pointed to a consulship in the Orient, and 
 thither young Arnold, just out of college, went 
 as assistant to the consul. It was an open 
 port in whose harbor the ships of all nations 
 lay anchored from year to year, vessels of 
 trade and men-of-war. Each flag that floated 
 in the harbor was represented in the port 
 by consuls and vice-consuls and officers of the 
 ships, and the English club house was the 
 common meeting point of all. Thus it was 
 that this tall Saxon found himself making a 
 part of a picture composed of every type 
 
A Human Product of the Hills. 33 
 
 of civilization on the globe, and set with orien- 
 tal hangings. 
 
 From this distant coast the young Ameri- 
 can began to send back pen pictures of orien- 
 tal life, and once the eagle had tried his wings 
 and found them good and strong, he was not 
 slow to seize the opportunity offered by a syn- 
 dicate of newspapers for letters from the 
 East. But before this work was well under 
 way, there came a change of administration 
 iii the Home Office, and the visitors demanded 
 the spoils. There was nothing to do but to 
 hand over the consulship to the new-comers, 
 and consul and vice-consul set sail for home. 
 It was here I found him a few months after 
 he landed, with plans unformed, knocking at 
 the door of opportunity, though not persist- 
 ently; for youth with health and conscious 
 strength is careless of the future. 
 
 Shortly after I had seen him that afternoon, 
 he was called to newspaper work, and five 
 years later, before he was thirty-two years 
 old, the body of this splendid specimen of 
 physical manhood was brought back to his 
 
34 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 native town and buried in the churchyard 
 where the remains of his people lay. The 
 funeral cortege which brought him back was 
 such as might have accompanied one of the 
 highest officials of the land. 
 
 When he came to me on the porch that 
 evening in July he was known to one hun- 
 dred or two hundred college mates as a bril- 
 liant but careless young fellow who knew 
 no fear, and who was the brain as well as 
 the brawn of the college football team; to 
 all of the people of his own town as a capable 
 and brilliant boy who might do anything or 
 nothing, and to a few others as the writer of 
 letters to newspapers — letters that people read 
 without knowing why. 
 
 The day after his death, April 3rd, 1904, the 
 newspapers were telling their readers that the 
 most brilliant and promising writer of the 
 Southern press had passed away. The story 
 of his taking off was brief. He had retired 
 to his room in a man's club, apparently in per- 
 fect health. About noon the next day they 
 found him in the throes of death. 
 
A Human Product of the Hills. 35 
 
 His newspaper work had been instantly 
 brilliant and successful. He couldn't keep 
 himself out of it. That's one reason every- 
 body read his writings — old men and young 
 women, young men and old women — and 
 when, a year afterwards, friends and admir- 
 ers gathered together some of his writings and 
 put them in a book, they were astonished to 
 find it was read, admired and loved by those 
 who had not known the charm of his fine 
 pf:i sonality, nor cared for the people or things 
 about which he wrote from day to day. They 
 cared because he who wrote was so finely 
 human and so well balanced himself that he 
 detected every lack of it in human character 
 ai.'d human actions. Thus it came about that 
 he laughed with us at foibles, wept with us 
 at misfortunes and enlisted our sympathies in 
 every form of weakness. 
 
 Things out of proper relation are humor- 
 ous or pathetic, and sometimes both. That 
 which great painters, great writers and great 
 orators do for the world, and which makes 
 the world love them, is to separate the true 
 
36 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 from the false, to show us what our un- 
 trained and careless eyes do not see, relying 
 upon the great good there is in human nature 
 to set at right the things that are wrong, and 
 lift our souls upward to the better life. 
 
MY AUNT 
 
 NOTE had come from my aunt saying 
 that the news of my presence in the 
 town had just reached her, and that 
 one of her sons would have called to ask me 
 to come to breakfast the next morning, but 
 they had all left her to find work elsewhere, 
 and the walk was a little more than she felt 
 equal to, or she would have come in person to 
 emphasize the desire of herself and her 
 daughters that I should break bread in her 
 house again. Where else in this busy South- 
 ern country does one now receive an invita- 
 tion to breakfast? What leisure there is in 
 the thought ! 
 
 When I entered my aunt's house, in res- 
 ponse to her invitation, I found her and her 
 daughters and another kinswoman in the 
 midst of a discussion on the subject of the 
 return of the Jews to Jerusalem. It appeared 
 that the newspapers had lately reported the 
 purchase of large tracts of land in Palestine 
 by certain rich Jews of Europe, and a lecture 
 delivered some years before by a distinguished 
 
38 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 Presbyterian minister on the restoration of the 
 Jews had just been unearthed. I recall now 
 that notwithstanding none of them had seen 
 me for years, my entrance into the room 
 scarcely created a ripple in the flow of ani- 
 mated conversation. They were talking about 
 things, and things, as well as the people who 
 talk about them, are far more interesting than 
 the mere discussion of people. 
 
 I was immediately appealed to to explain 
 a prophesy on any other theory than that this 
 was the method by which the Kingdom was 
 to be restored, a subject on which I felt my- 
 self to be profoundly ignorant, and on which 
 I began immediately to hedge. But no 
 account was apparently taken either of my 
 ignorance or my disclination to take sides. In 
 fact, there was only one side, for there were 
 the prophesies, and how were they to be gotten 
 over? One of the young ladies had them all 
 marked, for it seemed that the discussion had 
 been going on for days. 
 
 Here again I was taken away from the 
 whirl of factory w^heels and the everlasting 
 
My Aunt. 39 
 
 rattle of wagons over stone pavements by a 
 subject I had not heard mentioned in years. 
 It was allowed to die out, only temporarily, 
 I am sure, at the breakfast table, and after 
 having answered the inquiries that were then 
 made about myself and my family, I en- 
 deavored to recover my reputation, lost on the 
 prohpesies, by introducing a current topic with 
 which I thought I was fairly familiar. I was 
 listened to with great attention, but it soon 
 appeared that they knew much more about 
 it than I did, and when a little later some 
 mention was made of recent fashions, I 
 looked about me and discovered that every 
 dress, albeit of the simplest material, was cut 
 in the very latest style, and the hair of each 
 was coiled in a manner I had just seen once 
 on the head of a girl who returned from New 
 York the day I left home. And when it 
 came to the matter of the latest books, were 
 they not all there lying around on the tables 
 in the sitting room? Every one I had heard 
 of and many more. Uncle John sent this, a 
 brother another and some came from others 
 
4C The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 whose names, for well understood reasons, 
 were not given. 
 
 My aunt was really a remarkable woman 
 — not merely a reader, but an absorber of 
 books. A few people possess this gift. I have 
 heard that President Roosevelt had it in a 
 marked degree — the power to get everything 
 there is in a book in half the time it could 
 be read, line by line. One of the daughters 
 said, that day, that a young physician of the 
 town had lately secured an exhaustive medi- 
 cal work, just out, on the subject of nervous 
 diseases, and her mother had absorbed it in 
 twenty- four hours, and at that moment she 
 know as much about the subject as any doctor 
 in the State. Her inclinations had run to- 
 wards medicine and the neighbors sent for 
 her before the doctor was called; but there 
 appeared to be no subject which she did not 
 seem to be able to master, and yet, again it 
 appeared that for lack of opportunity such 
 rare gifts were allowed to go to waste. I 
 recalled that when a boy I had gone to church 
 with her and discovered that she sang the 
 
My Aunt. 41 
 
 hymns without a book. When I asker her, in 
 childish wonder, if she knew them all, she 
 said no, but if her attention happened to be 
 given to the minister as he read them, she 
 could remember them, for the time being, at 
 least, and what astonished me most was that, 
 with rare modesty, she seemed to consider 
 this no great accomplishment. 
 
 But the gift of acqiurement was only one of 
 many possessed by this unusual woman : she 
 had all the gentleness, tenderness and instinct- 
 ive penetration of her sex, combined with 
 masculine powers of comprehension and anal- 
 ysis. I recall that in a conversation with 
 her that morning she was telling me of the 
 death and burial of Uncle Mose, a former 
 slave of her father's, noted to her generation 
 and mine as our greatest authority on negro 
 folk-lore. She said that in repeating these 
 stories to her children it occurred to her to 
 give some study to them, to see if they threw 
 any light on the negro character, and she had 
 gone but a little way into the subject when it 
 appeared that the Brer Rabbit, who figures in 
 
42 TJie Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 nearly, if not quite all of the original stories, 
 was the negro himself in his relation to other 
 races. Brer Rabbit not only represented the 
 hopes and fears of the race, but the methods 
 born of them. He was not only not as smart 
 as Brer Fox, nor as brave as Brer Lion, nor 
 as strong as Brer Bear, but, in the language 
 of the street, he generally *'got there." Being 
 the weakest of all the animals, what he got, 
 by hook or crook, was, in the vernacular of 
 the tales, "his'n," and there is nothing in the 
 stories themselves to show that any questions 
 of morality ever influenced his conduct. He 
 seemed to prefer to win his way in the world 
 by good humor, by humility and by fawning, 
 but once he got the upper hand, what a con- 
 sciousless tyrant he was ! He did not seem to 
 crave the courage, the strength, the intelli- 
 gence or the other possessions of the superior 
 animals, except in so far as these might 
 enable him to get the whip hand. Envy, jeal- 
 ousy and the love of wealth seemed to have 
 no part of the life of Brer Rabbit. What he 
 wanted was power, which he generally used 
 
My Aunt. 43 
 
 for purposes of revenge, or at best for display 
 in the presence of his superiors. 
 
 Now that she has passed to the great Be- 
 yond and sees face to face the truth which 
 she sought with a power and concentration 
 I have not seen suprassed, the picture of her 
 that stands out boldest in my memory was 
 made when she sat by me, after we had that 
 talk, without a motion of her body, absolutely 
 unconscious of the passage of time. The 
 silence was broken by her making a quotation 
 from a great writer, to which she gave her 
 hearty assent, to the effect that no intelHgent 
 man or woman could consider, without diver- 
 sion, for the space of two hours the claims 
 of the Christian religion without embracing 
 it or descending to the depths of despair. 
 
 This sitting still and gazing into vacancy: 
 it is called absent-mindedness. Rather is it 
 absence of bodily consciousness, and the very 
 presence of the spirit that lies at the root of 
 resolution, of the power that is creative, of 
 the influence which determines which way 
 the world shall move. The strong have it, 
 
44 "Tlie Breed and TJie Pasture. 
 
 and it is the source of their strength. The 
 weak may appear to have it, but with them 
 it is only an idle dream, or the birth-hour 
 of an elemental and unlawful passion which 
 will carry them down before its superior 
 strength. 
 
 The process of thought by which my aunt 
 reached the conclusion shown by her utter- 
 ance was not difficult to trace, as I recalled the 
 experience of that morning. Of course all 
 folk-lore, and the songs of the oppressed, and 
 those in bondage, looked forward to the lift- 
 ing of the yoke. The analogy might mean 
 something, or nothing. It only served in this 
 case to open up the line of thought that was 
 extending like an electric current all over 
 the South, fed by the serious thinkers in every 
 part of it, but interrupted by incessant coun- 
 ter-currents from New England writers, and 
 those of New England training and proclivi- 
 ties, who enjoy the rare distinction of being 
 able to attend to everybody's business and 
 make a success of their own. 
 
 Would education and Anglo-Saxon environ- 
 
My Aunt. 45 
 
 ment create in negroes a conscience and the 
 sense of justice and charity? I was sure my 
 aunt reUed more on the Christian reHgion, 
 and yet to those who like her had, all their 
 lives, seen them dance and play, who had 
 nursed them when they were sick, had been 
 with them when they died, and had tried to 
 teach them the simple truths of this religion — 
 to these masters and mistresses only was it 
 vouchsafed to know how often these people 
 heard The Call of the Jungle. 
 
 Up to the period of which I write educa- 
 tion had produced little more than imitative 
 arrogance, apish superciliousness, idleness and 
 — green goggles! 
 
m 
 
 THE EXTRAORDINARY LOYALTY OF 
 A NEGRO MAN 
 
 ELLEFORD ARNOLD, lawyer, mem- 
 ber of the Confederate Congress, 
 oldest son of Col. Iredell Arnold, 
 of the most noted house in the county, 
 a man in the prime of vigorous man- 
 hood, a counterpart in mental structure of 
 her who has been described in these pages 
 as ''my aunt," who was his sister, had been 
 killed in the next to the last year of the Civil 
 War. While at home between the sessions 
 of Congress a neighboring recruiting camp 
 for the training and organization of a home 
 guard was attacked by a marauding band of 
 Unionists and deserters from the neighboring 
 mountains, and the town itself was threatened. 
 A group of old men and boys armed them- 
 selves with shot guns and undertook to pur- 
 sue and capture them. In a skirmish which 
 followed, Arnold was shot and died a few 
 days later. 
 
 Being a lawyer, his own home was in the 
 town. Twenty years before he had married, 
 
48 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 at the State Capital, one of the most beauti- 
 ful, gracious, and accomplished women of the 
 Commonwealth, a daughter of one of the 
 most distinguished governors it ever had. 
 Their home was the center of the social life 
 of Evanston, and much of the charm of it 
 came from the exquisite tact and loving kind- 
 ness of the hostess. 
 
 The widow of Welleford Arnold was thus 
 left with five children. Thus it was through- 
 out that long and terrible struggle that the 
 men to whom the depleted country might look 
 for its rebuilding were killed, and the women 
 and children were left with land and negroes. 
 A few months later the negroes were free and 
 the land worthless. 
 
 Some twelve or fifteen years before his 
 death and while sitting alone in his room in 
 a neighboring town where he was attending 
 a law court, Welleford Arnold was approach- 
 ed by a fine looking negro man who told him 
 that his master had that day informed him 
 that he was to be sold to pay the master's 
 debts, but had given him the privilege of 
 
Extraordinary Loyalty of a Negro Man. 49 
 
 choosing his owner. He begged Arnold to 
 buy him, saying with a dignity and force that 
 were impressive, that if he did he would never 
 have cause to regret ilt. The change of own- 
 ers was speedily effected, and this man, Rod- 
 man, was put in charge of Arnold's farm as 
 overseer — a position usually held by white 
 men. 
 
 In the beginning he took orders from the 
 master. In the end, the master, being engaged 
 with his profession and with public affairs, 
 heard reports and approved them. When the 
 master was killed Rodman took charge of the 
 family's affairs, and when he was freed his 
 relations never changed in the least. Being 
 hampered by no traditions, he was not cast 
 down by the conditions of the times; he used 
 them. He was in sympathy with his master 
 and therefore with his cause, but being a 
 man of sense with no sentiment except loy- 
 alty to the family's interests as he understood 
 them, he must have seen the hopelessness of 
 the contest, and probably put away gold, or 
 some equivalent against the evil day, for it 
 
50 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 was known that Rodman Arnold — he retained 
 the family name — had money to buy things 
 with for the family and for the farm before 
 the shrewdest men in the county had been 
 able to acquire it. He lived in a well fur- 
 nished house with his wife, who occupied the 
 same relation to the family that he did, and 
 tie'ther of them associated with other negroes 
 except in a remote and superior way. Poli- 
 tics never touched him, nor, apparently, reli- 
 gion. It was said on the one hand that if he 
 would leave the Arnolds he would soon be 
 a rich man. Others asserted that Mrs. Arnold 
 and her children would find out some day that 
 Rodman owned everything and they nothing. 
 But Mrs. Arnold always replied, in effect, 
 that she and they had what they wanted. 
 
 The girls were sent to the best schools in 
 the land and often on trips of pleasure, but 
 not before Uncle Rodman was asked about 
 it. Schools and colleges were chosen for the 
 boys after Uncle Rodman had said whether 
 or not the family's income would permit of 
 it. One after another the dauerhters were 
 
Extraordinary Loyalty of a Negro Man. 51 
 
 married, and on each occasion he and his wife 
 were given a prominent position in the group 
 assembled around the bride and groom. 
 
 The extraordinary loyahy of Rodman Ar- 
 nold, colored, to Mrs. Arnold continued for 
 twenty-five years, or until her death, and to 
 members of her family to the day this is writ- 
 ten, more than forty years after he was a free 
 man. It was the devotion of a subject to his 
 queen and to her offsprings. So long as she 
 lived her sway not only held his loyalty to her 
 person and her interests, but controlled his 
 private life which was exemplary as a man 
 and a citizen. The loyalty he nevei lost, but 
 it has been said that in his private life the 
 absence of her influence has been often seen. 
 Through her liberal remuneration and his 
 own business ability, he has acquired a com- 
 petence, and is spending his last days in com- 
 fort. Along with his own affairs he watches 
 over certain real estate interests of the fam- 
 ily with the eye of a lynx and the suspicion 
 not inseparable from old age even in those 
 born in a higher scale of existence than his. 
 
52 The Breed and The Pasture, 
 
 Such an influence as Mrs. Arnold exerted 
 over this man is given to certain rare and 
 exquisite characters, the flower and fruit of 
 the race. Its perfection is seen only in the 
 white light that is reflected upon it by all who 
 come within its radiance. She touched the 
 rude nature of Rodman with a perfect trust 
 in his integrity and loyalty, and the seeds of 
 good that were in him grew and choked the 
 tares. 
 
 It's an old story, but one the world seems 
 slow to learn: Such faith as we have we 
 give. 
 
I CROSS THE BRIDGE IN THE SEARCH 
 FOR TRUTH 
 
 Y friend Mr. Gates, the counsellor, had 
 always lived in Evanston, content with 
 a small law practice and apparently 
 happy enough if he had means to procure a 
 sufficiency of spotless linen, which was his 
 hobby. It occurred to me that a contrast of 
 his views on the subject that was now upper- 
 most in my mind with those of Ellison Arnold 
 would develop something of interest, and I 
 asked them both why it was that it had been 
 said that the women were superior to the 
 men of Evanston. The counsellor, an ardent 
 admirer of the female sex as a whole, re- 
 sented the intimation and straightway began 
 to show that there was nothing the matter 
 with the men. "Why sir," said he, "we have 
 furnished the State a governor, two railroad 
 presidents, a member of Congress, a supreme 
 court judge and the most astute politicians 
 she could boast of. On one occasion when 
 we were making a big fight, there was talk 
 of nominating our three most distinguished 
 
54 T^he Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 citizens for the Legislature, Senate and 
 House — and the governor sent word to one 
 of his friends to see that all of them didn't 
 come to Raleigh at once, 'for,' said he, 'if 
 they do, they will move the State Capitol to 
 Evanston.' " 
 
 Ellison Arnold said that the town of Evans- 
 ton bore the same relation to the rest of the 
 State that North Carolina had to the Union 
 in that she furnished much of the talent that 
 was helping to build up other sections, and 
 he referred to the fact that two of the largest 
 manufacturing enterprises in the State were 
 managed by Evanston men who had actually 
 made them what they were, and that both 
 of these men had left their home town with 
 scarcely enough money in their pockets to pay 
 railroad fare. 
 
 It was shown in the course of that conver- 
 sation that these two men had under their 
 care five times as many people as there were 
 then in the town of Evanston and the mills 
 which they controlled absorbed more than ten 
 per cent of the entire cotton crop of the State. 
 
Across the Bridge in Search for Truth. 55 
 
 A long list was made of others who had gone 
 away and made names for themselves in other 
 Imes of activity, but neither these two nor 
 others with whom I talked seemed disposed 
 to look for the cause of the existing conditions, 
 and as it was to this that I had determined to 
 address myself, I decided to drop the agree- 
 able and lighter task of describing the interest- 
 ing people I found about me, and go back into 
 their history. For whatever else might be 
 said of them, they all had one characteristic 
 in common — the habit of being entertaining — 
 an art it was, and is — one which it seemed to 
 me then the people of some other parts of 
 the State were beginnig to lose, which many 
 of those who live to the North of us have 
 almost wholly lost. It does not go with 
 much money nor with a busy life and does not 
 come immediately after either. ''It is a giving, 
 not getting, and the best kind of giving, for it 
 is the giving of a part of one's self." 
 
THE DEATH OF WILLIAM IV. 
 
 ROUND the town of Evanston, a mile 
 or more away and far below it, flows 
 
 a river with a soft Indian name. On 
 its far side the level land extends back to the 
 foothills, at some places a mile and a half. 
 It must be seven miles or more from the 
 point where the stream first pours against 
 this promontory on the west, its strength of 
 mountain current, to that on the east where 
 it steals away from it under cover of the 
 overhanging green along its banks, baffled but 
 unconquered. Across the level bottom lands 
 on the edge of the hills stand the homes of 
 those who owned this richly productive soil, 
 each house having a name of its own — Mim- 
 osa, Deer Ponds, Missionary Meadows, River 
 Side, Belmont and others more musical or less 
 suggestive. The architecture of the oldest of 
 these houses gives no suggestion of the Col- 
 onial style prevalent in the old Virginia 
 homes. The men who built them had not 
 come from Virginia. They had filtered down 
 from the edge of New England or from 
 
58 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 Pennsylvania or Maryland to the coast first, 
 and thence followed the streams towards their 
 sources in search of rich soil. Only inciden- 
 tally did they seek a good climate, for with 
 pioneers physical comfort has ever been a 
 secondary consideration. The houses were 
 rather suggestive of old England, in that they 
 were, for the most part, built close to the 
 ground and without porches. In warm 
 weather the occupants took out the chairs and 
 sat under the trees. The oldest, Belmont, had 
 no passage (now known by the name of 
 hall) through the house, but the whole of one 
 end of the building was one large room — the 
 old English hall, where the master formally 
 received his guests, or held his court, if he 
 w^ere clothed with magisterial authority. An- 
 other, that of Deer Ponds, a more recent 
 structure, was marked by the number of its 
 gables — not quite ''The House of Seven 
 Gables," but enough dormer windows to make 
 up for the deficiency. With the single excep- 
 tion of Belmont, none of these old houses sat 
 on a hill, but near the foot in proximity to 
 
The Death of William IV. 59 
 
 the cultivated bottom lands, and close to a 
 stream from which the live stock could be 
 supplied with water. The owner and builder 
 of Belmont may have had an eye to the beauty 
 of blue mountains, for the whole line of the 
 Blue Ridge w^as visible from the elevation on 
 which he reared his home, but it is more likely 
 that this was due to the fact that his fields 
 of waving wheat and corn lay in the lowlands 
 along the two rivers that converge there and 
 come together a half mile to the east of the 
 house. 
 
 It was at Belmont that an incident occurred 
 that was described to me during the early part 
 of my stay in Evanston, by Col. Burgwyn 
 Gardener, who married one of the daughters 
 of the house and was the only survivor of that 
 generation. He was a lawyer, of fine address, 
 polished manners and emotional nature, dis- 
 tinguished throughout the Piedmont region. 
 It was said that he would have been offered 
 a judgeship but for his dramatic and almost 
 sensational behavior in the court house. Com- 
 posure of manner is often mistaken for the 
 
6o The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 judicial mind, and those who lack it are rarely 
 given positions of honor when the choice is 
 made by their peers. 
 
 Col. Gardener — everybody called him that, 
 never Colonel without the Gardener — had 
 made a profound impression upon me as a 
 boy, chiefly, I think, because he always wore 
 patent leather shoes and a silk hat, even dur- 
 ing the war, and never spoke to me or any 
 other boy. When we met him on the street 
 the muscles of his face were undergoing such 
 rapid changes that wc thought he must either 
 be talking to himself or doing some loud 
 thinking, and we stumbled over stones in the 
 streets because our eyes were fastened on 
 his mobile face and the flash of his white 
 teeth, until he had passed us by. 
 
 I had thought of him often during the in- 
 tervening years, and particularly in connec- 
 tion with a remark I had heard attributed to 
 another, who being twitted on one occasion 
 for some high color or extravagance in dress, 
 justified himself by saying that it was no 
 fault of his if man had changed the ways of 
 
The Death of IViUiam IV. 6i 
 
 nature in which the male bird always had the 
 most brilliant plumage. In the absence of 
 proof, I am incHned to think it was said by 
 Col. Burgwyn Gardener. 
 
 When I met him now and he understood 
 who I was, he grasped my arm and imme- 
 diately began to speak of the incident to which 
 I have referred. 
 
 "Did you ever hear of the remarkable occur- 
 rence connected with the death of Col. Elli- 
 son?" he said. 
 
 When I told him I did not recall it, if I had, 
 he said that now he knew I had never heard 
 it. 
 
 ''We had all assembled around the death 
 bed," he began. "The scene is one I will 
 never forget. The leading man in the county, 
 the founder of a large family (for you recall 
 that he had fifteen children, nearly all of 
 whom lived to the age of maturity), a fine 
 spirit, a brave and courteous gentleman, was 
 in extremis, and all who could be summoned 
 were there. Even now as I try to recall the 
 faces of these friends and companions of my 
 
62 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 younger clays, I always go back to that pic- 
 ture. Near the foot of the bed stood Welle- 
 ford Arnold, the oldest grandson. You re- 
 member him, a young lawyer and politician 
 who afterwards became a leading member of 
 the Confederate Congress. He was always 
 a favorite with his grandfather. His mother 
 stood leaning on his shoulder, and just behind 
 them towered the rugged features and massive 
 heal of Col. Arnold, father and husband. A 
 shock went through the bystanders when the 
 dying man opened wide his eyes, which 
 seemed to summon Welle ford, who bent over 
 him. Then came the sound of a few words 
 which none could hear except the grandson, 
 who, turning to the assembled group, with 
 infinite pity and tenderness in his voice, said, 
 'his mind seems to be wandering at the last — 
 he says William the Fourth is dead,' and 
 when all eyes were again turned to the bed 
 the Master of Belmont had expired. 
 
 "Some two or three weeks later I met 
 Welle ford at the postoffice on the arrival of 
 the stage which carried the mail, and when we 
 
The Death of William IV. 63 
 
 opened the papers we found the death of Eng- 
 land's King announced as having occurred on 
 the very day of the death of the master of 
 Belmont. We walked together to his office 
 in silence. There the details of the death of 
 the King were read, including a mention of 
 the exact hour at which his majesty expired. 
 We made a calculation for difference in time 
 and found it to correspond almost to the min- 
 ute to the time at which Col. "f^llison made 
 the announcement to Welleford." 
 
THE TWINS OF BELMONT 
 
 ELMONT, Deer Ponds and perhaps 
 other of the older houses had been aban- 
 doned by the heirs of the original own- 
 ers years before. The conditions of the times 
 had carried them to the town. The last occu- 
 pants of Belmont, who had lived there to- 
 gether for nearly two score years, were a 
 brother and sister. They were twins, and 
 neither of them had ever married. They main- 
 tained to the last not only the greater tradi- 
 tions of the household, but also its minor cus- 
 toms — meals at the exact hours of 6, 12 and 
 6, summer and winter, whether alone or with 
 a house full of company; corn meal batter- 
 cakes for breakfast, exactly the same in qual- 
 ity and appearance amid all the changes of 
 cooks, and without a single break in a period 
 of seventy-five years ; the presence of a pack 
 cf fox hounds and beagles whose breed had 
 not changed for a half century, and a family 
 of cats whose ancestry was as old as that of 
 the house; and finally in the regulations gov- 
 erning the keeping of the Sabbath day, which 
 
66 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 were only surpassed in their severity by the 
 absolute and undeviating rectitude of the daily 
 conduct of the master and mistress. 
 
 These two owned the place and the property 
 jointly, and whenever the smallest product of 
 the farm was sold the proceeds were evenly 
 divided. Each had a riding horse and a driv- 
 ing horse and a servant over which the other 
 had no control. Except on funeral or wed- 
 ding occasions they travelled nowhere to- 
 gether, because, forsooth, both might not wish 
 to depart or return at the same hour. 
 
 When the uncle wanted the presence of a 
 servant, he stepped to the door and gave a 
 call which could be heard at the remotest 
 house in the negro quarters, a good half-mile 
 away, and the awful tone of his voice could 
 not fail to suggest to a stranger a fixed deter- 
 mination to kill and quarter the luckless Tom 
 or Caesar the moment he presented himself. 
 But the negroes and the dogs knew better, and 
 the cats rubbed their sides and stiffened tails 
 against his legs and purred while yet he stood 
 and yelled. The stranger knew better, too, 
 
7' he Tzvius of Belmont. 67 
 
 when he turned and showed a smile on his 
 face that robbed voice and manner of every 
 suggestion of sternness or severity. 
 
 That the attachment of the two to each 
 other was of that close kind which may exist 
 between twins, everyone knew, and yet it 
 was believed that throughout their long lives 
 together, neither had expressed it to the other. 
 It was altogether too delicate and respectful 
 for words, or even a caress, except that which 
 came in the form of half concealed service. 
 It is related that a tactless, or rudely mischiev- 
 ous young kinsman once said at dinner that 
 he believed his uncle loved his aunt. There 
 was an immediate explosion at the foot of the 
 table and a milder sensation at the head. Both 
 turned scarlet, and left the room by different 
 doors. A moment later an angry and startled 
 voice from the big hall cried out, ''confound 
 it, what are you doing here?" This was fol- 
 lowed by a frightened little scream and the 
 slam of two more doors, and the abandoned 
 guests knew that in trying to avoid each 
 other, they had met face to face. 
 
68 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 It was afterwards learned that he spent the 
 remainder of the day in ''the office," a little 
 house in the corner of the yard, in one room 
 of which he kept his guns and fishing tackle 
 atid in the other, slept. He remained there 
 smoking a pipe and unpacking a box that con- 
 tained a lady's side saddle, of handsome de- 
 sign and finish, bought months before, and 
 intended for a Christmas present. From the 
 b)ack window he held secret communication 
 with Sam, his sister's servant, with whom it 
 was arranged that the new saddle should be 
 put on the back of her horse ''Gramp" for the 
 ride he knew she was to take the next morn- 
 ing to MacDonald's, across Deep River. She, 
 meanwhile, sat at her window in the big house 
 catching up some dropped stitches in a pair 
 of warm woolen riding gloves, and watching 
 to see when he left the office that she might 
 slip out there and lay them on his bed. 
 
 These things, and many like them, they did 
 from year to year for each other, and for 
 their dependents on the farm until the brother 
 was removed by death. The old plantation 
 
The Tzvins of Belmont. 69 
 
 had been left to them, and with it, most of 
 the slaves. They cared for the slaves and the 
 slaves worked the farm. They neither bought 
 them nor sold them, but having them, they 
 watched over their health and comfort, and 
 did the best they could to improve their mor- 
 als and raise their standard of living until 
 they were all set free, and for many years 
 thereafter. 
 
 There was another member of the family 
 associated with the later day history of the 
 house, a little lady whose face must have been 
 that of a Madonna, for her life was gentle 
 and her nature quietly but intensely religious. 
 It is known that she kept a spotlessly clean 
 closet, into which, following literally the Scrip- 
 tural injunction, she retired many times each 
 day to pray, and on those days on which news 
 came to Belmont of the birth of a male child 
 in any of the numerous branches of the fam- 
 ily, she spent the most of that day there sol- 
 emnly dedicating him to the service of the 
 Lord for His use in the gospel ministry. Such 
 faith as this was not seen in all Israel, for al- 
 
70 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 though she lived many years, she never knew 
 that a single one of them ever engaged in 
 that great work, and, so far as I have known, 
 no one of them has done so to this day. On 
 the other hand, perhaps without exception, 
 the female descendants of the family have 
 j.'cpt the faith in spirit and in truth, taking the 
 lead in every good work, and building no 
 home which did not have reserved in it a 
 prophet's chamber. Thus it would appear that 
 even this gentle saint, full of faith, knew not 
 what she asked, but because of the asking and 
 ci the faith, God has raised up and inspired 
 — not public preachers of His Word, but — a 
 widely scattered band of ministering angels, 
 without whose Christian work and example, 
 preaching would be foolishness, and the spread 
 of the gospel would come to an end. 
 
 A life of ease these people led, would you 
 say? Far from it. The enslavers were en- 
 slaved by their sense of personal responsibility. 
 A hundred souls were dependent absolutely 
 upon them, even for bread. In the present 
 day we hire our servants and laborers and 
 
The Tzvins of Belmont. 71 
 
 when we pay them, we are accustomed to 
 consider that our responsibihty for them is 
 discharged. Whatever personal relation may 
 exist is cut off with the summer vacation, a 
 change in size of the family or a desire for 
 better or less expensive service. Oftener still 
 the loose and fragile bond is severed by the 
 servant who feels it less. The call of the 
 West, the inborn spirit of the pioneer, appealed 
 to virile and courageous spirits like Hadley 
 Ellison, but their slaves tied them. There 
 were iron furnaces and rolling mills about 
 High Shoals, and cotton factories down the 
 river, but the owners knew that these occupa- 
 tions were too far removed from the soil for 
 a race but recently taken from the jungles 
 of Africa. Once when he was yet in the 
 prime of young manhood Hadley Ellison, with 
 his nephew, Leslie Arnold, and one or two 
 others, actually did break the bonds and went 
 to California. This was in the early 50's, 
 after gold was discovered there. Notwith- 
 standing the same government which had per- 
 mitted the slave trade to New Englanders and 
 
'J2 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 allowed slave holding in the South had pro- 
 hibited slavery in California, they took a few 
 able bodied negro men with them. The prop- 
 erty they had consisted of lands and negroes. 
 They couldn't take the land. To sell it was 
 to part with their patrimony, and, besides, 
 it had but little value, being yet abundant. 
 They didn't wish to sell negroes and put the 
 money in their pockets for use when they 
 got there: they took them, in spite of the fact 
 that the moment these slaves set their feet on 
 the soil of California they were free men. 
 Leslie Arnold died. Many of the others were 
 attacked with an epidemic of fever that car- 
 ried off many courageous spirits that had gone 
 there from all parts of the country, and the 
 expedition proved a failure. Notwithstand- 
 ing that their owner was dead and they were 
 free men, the surviving slaves of Leslie and 
 those of Hadley appealed to the latter to take 
 them back home, and master and slaves re- 
 turned and again put their necks into the yoke. 
 I have said that Belmont sat on a hill. But 
 there were just such other hills around it on 
 
The Tzvins of Belmont. 73 
 
 all sides. The roads which led to it traversed 
 these hills in a straight line — up one and down 
 another. Standing at the house one saw a half 
 mile away a red streak which rose between 
 the fields in a line that looked almost perpen- 
 dicular. Standing at the top of that hill and 
 looking towards the house, a stranger won- 
 dered how any horse could climb it. But if he 
 kept on his way down, his way up again 
 seemed easier, and when he was at the very 
 bottom, the difficulties had disappeared. 
 
 I do not suppose there is a single intelligent 
 human being who ever traveled over long red 
 hills but has had this sensation and felt the 
 lesson it teaches, and yet I do not recall that 
 it has ever been used in literature by poet or 
 preacher. Those who go down them and 
 climb up on the other side are stronger every 
 time they do it. Courage is largely a ques- 
 tion of having done the thing before, some- 
 one has written. Those who do it oftenest 
 are the least afraid. Perhaps this is the 
 strength of the hills "whence cometh our 
 help." Certainly it is true that courage grows 
 
74 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 best on mountain sides and in the valleys be- 
 tween them — the kind of courage that is not 
 afraid of difficulties, that surmounts them by 
 going straight over them, seeking no devious 
 paths, nor needing for its support any human 
 shoulder-touch. 
 
A GLIMPSE OF LIFE AT DEER PONDS 
 
 Y FIRST — the very first — recollection 
 
 of Deer Ponds was of a scene in front 
 of the house. As I write this sentence, 
 it occurs to me that all our first recollections 
 are of things we saw rather than of those 
 heard or felt, and yet I also remember that I 
 was standing in front of a large, low window, 
 and what I saw was seen through half -blind- 
 ing tears. A dozen men were seated on horses 
 that stood or moved restlessly in the semi-cir- 
 cular driveway. The doorway was filled by 
 the ladies of the household. Remembering the 
 scene, I also recall that I must have been told 
 that all this stir meant a deer hunt, and that I 
 couldn't go. I must have seen them file out 
 of the big gate and along the side of the big 
 red hill, disappearing around the curved road 
 that encircled its base, but I have no recol- 
 lection of anything but the picture of the men 
 on horseback and the women at the door, until 
 I was patted on the head and caressed by a 
 very tall man I had been told to call grand- 
 father — a man with rugged features and an 
 
76 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 iron-gray hair parted on each side and roach- 
 ed up high in the middle of his head. What 
 was that I heard? That we couldn't go deer 
 hunting, but that he and Uncle Jacob and I 
 would go to hunt bees, and I should ride the 
 sorrel colt with a bright red blanket on it and 
 a surcingle. 
 
 There must have been tedious delays until 
 all the preparations could be made, but the 
 memory of all this has faded, leaving the one 
 bright and glorious picture of the big man 
 riding away leading the sorrel colt, on the back 
 of which sat a boy exultant as Csesar or Pom- 
 pey triumphantly entering Rome, while Uncle 
 Jacob — a long-bodied, short-legged negro man 
 ■ — walked alongside, carrying an axe and a 
 tin bucket — the axe to fell the tree, and the 
 bucket to hold the honey we were sure to 
 find in the hollow thereof. 
 
 The big, strong man who, on a holiday, laid 
 aside care and thus sought to console a dis- 
 appointed boy, was Col. Iredell Arnold, head 
 of the house of Deer Ponds, the most influen- 
 tial man in the county, the host of every dis- 
 
A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. yy 
 
 tinguished visitor who came to the neighbor- 
 ing town of Evanston on business or pleasure, 
 president of the bank there, and leader of the 
 best thought of the best people of the Pied- 
 mont section of the State. 
 
 A well-known writer of local history once 
 published an account of a visit to Deer Ponds 
 during the period of which I am writing, the 
 decade from 1850 to i860, in which it was 
 said, by the way of showing the royal hospi- 
 tality of the house, that the day she drove 
 away from its gates, her driver told her that 
 forty horses belonging to guests had been 
 cared for in the ample stables the night be- 
 fore. Being incredulous, she made the count 
 of the equipages of the visitors, and satisfied 
 herself of the truth of the statement. 
 
 In the house at Deer Ponds — or rather the 
 houses, for there were two of them — there 
 were sixteen rooms. The first one was built 
 by the original Welleford Arnold, a lawyer 
 born in New England and descended from 
 one of the families who had come over to join 
 their fortunes with those of the original Puri- 
 
78 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 tans who landed at Plymouth Rock. He had 
 been educated at Princeton, moved South 
 when a young man, and was for years Solici- 
 tor to the Crown in the more thickly settled 
 portion of the State. This first house was 
 stuccoed, and had sharp gables and dormer 
 windows. The new one was built of red 
 brick, and was of the square wood-box type, 
 with enormous rooms and a passage through 
 it that looked like a banquet hall. It was 
 built by the present owner. Col. Iredell Ar- 
 nold. 
 
 Sixteen children had been born there, ten 
 of whom lived to maturity — big bodied, vir- 
 ile, alert and courageous — six sons and four 
 daughters. The boys were all educated at the 
 State University and the girls, for the most 
 part, by special tutors or imported teachers 
 employed jointly by this and other families in 
 the town and neighborhood. Two of the 
 daughters and two of the sons were married; 
 the daughters having gone with their hus- 
 bands to other parts of the State. One son, 
 a lawyer, had settled in the town and another 
 
A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. 79 
 
 had built a home on a farm in the neighbor- 
 hood. 
 
 The house was large to meet the demand o£ 
 hospitality. This demand was inspired by the 
 desire of the owner and his family to mingle 
 with the best thought and the best life in the 
 land. The place was instinct with life. All 
 guests were welcome, but none were enjoj^ed 
 so much as those who brought from the out- 
 side world a new thought or were able to re- 
 port a new phase or a change of trend in the 
 political world. 
 
 Literature in the United States was still in 
 an undeveloped state and the number of news- 
 papers was few. Such as there were, confined 
 their publications largely to official documents, 
 and notable utterances of public men. A large 
 table in the hall was always covered with the 
 best of those then printed in America and 
 some from England. Here the debates were 
 held and the inside history of new movements 
 was made known. These were stirring times 
 in the history of the Republic, and the contest 
 appealed to these strong men. The political 
 
8o The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 field appeared to them the only arena on which 
 they could meet and try their strength, and the 
 art of social intercourse which the Southerner 
 of that day unquestionably possessed, found 
 in such homes as this the best soil for its 
 growth and development. 
 
 The domestic arrangements of the house- 
 hold were singularly free from ostentation. 
 The furniture was simple, the table appoint- 
 ments wholly unobstructive but necessarily 
 abundant, and the servants were numerous be- 
 cause there were many to serve. None 
 appeared in livery of any sort, with the pos- 
 sible exception of the coachman, who, on 
 Sundays, when driving the family to church, 
 may have worn the master's last year's silk 
 hat. Few pictures adorned the walls. The 
 lawn in front of the house was covered with 
 unkept grass and planted with certain trees 
 that then seemed to be considered marks of 
 civilization — the china berry, the mimosa, the 
 cedar, the white pine and the locust. Per- 
 haps the only attempt at landscape gardening 
 effect was a circle, thirty feet or more in dia- 
 
A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds, 8i 
 
 ameter, of tall cedars, in front of the old 
 house through which the walk to the front 
 door led. On the south side was a large 
 flower garden with some evidences of design, 
 but chiefly noticed for its abundance of roses, 
 snow-balls, crepe myrtle, jessamine, and other 
 flowers and shrubbery now ragarded as old- 
 fashioned. Like everything else about the 
 place, this flower garden suggested the idea 
 of being kept up solely for the flowers it 
 grew and the service it rendered to the mas- 
 ter and mistress of the place in adding to 
 pleasure of their numerous guests. 
 
 A singular illustration of the neglect of 
 minor personal comforts occurs to me at this 
 moment. Between the old house and the new 
 there was a space of six to ten feet which was 
 spanned by a bridge a few feet above the 
 ground. Notwithstanding both houses were 
 in use and the passing between them was con- 
 stant, this connecting bridge was not only 
 never closed, but was not even covered with 
 a roof. 
 
 The kitchen must have been a hundred and 
 
S2 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 fifty feet from the house. The reason for 
 this, no doubt, was that adjoining it in the 
 long low building was the washroom, the 
 "weave" room, a store-room for the products 
 of the garden and orchard, and a sewing room 
 where the clothes for the negroes were made, 
 and it was not desirable to have all these do- 
 mestic arrangements close to the dwelling. 
 Flying black Mercurys passed and repassed 
 from the cook to the head-servant in the 
 dining-room, especially on waffle days, and 
 most days were of that kind at Deer Ponds. 
 
 The feeding and clothing of a constantly in- 
 creasing number of slaves was becoming a 
 serious problem to the master and mistress of 
 Deer Ponds, as to many others. There were 
 no idle rich here. The products of the farm 
 were corn, wheat and oats, and it was all 
 eaten up by negroes and stock. If anything 
 was left it couldn't be sold, for it was a hun- 
 dred miles to a railroad. Farming methods 
 were crude, as they always will be where labor 
 is cheap and abundant. The cattle that were 
 raised on the fine grazing land in the moun- 
 
A Glimpse of Life at Deer Ponds. 83 
 
 tains, much of which Col. Arnold owned, were 
 brought down to the plantation and slaughtered 
 to feed the slaves. In the summer months, as 
 1 remember, they killed a beef every day and 
 never sold a pound. Even the hide was tan- 
 ned on the place and made into shoes by hand. 
 The only source of wealth was the increase in 
 the number or value of the slaves, and this 
 was not available except by sale. None were 
 ever sold. As they increased, more land had 
 to be bought from the small farmers who then 
 moved further up among the hills. Often a 
 thousand acres had to be purchased to get a 
 hundred of bottom land, which, with their 
 methods, was the only kind they could afford 
 to work. The situation was becoming intoler- 
 able. There were hundreds of Southern plan- 
 ters who would have freed their slaves but 
 for the fact that such a course would have left 
 them impoverished. INIost of them were in 
 debt, and their slaves were their only assets 
 except the land, which was valueless without 
 them. Many had moved to the cotton lands 
 of the far South. Others, like Col. Arnold, 
 
84 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 were held by local attachments or the high 
 price of these cotton lands. Sir Henry Lyell, 
 the eminent English geologist, who spent many 
 months in Alabama as early as 1846, tells us, 
 in his book of travels, that even in the cotton 
 lands, many planters with whom he spent 
 much time complained that their slaves were 
 eating them out of house and home, and they 
 were then threatening to move on to Texas, 
 
 On the heels of these changing conditions 
 came the assaults of the abolitionists, which 
 fired the South with resentment, and a peace- 
 able disposition of the question of slavery was 
 made impossible. 
 
 England had freed her slaves twenty-five 
 years before at a cost to the government of 
 $130 each. The United States government 
 freed them at a cost of $700 each, with the loss 
 Oi 700,000 lives ! 
 
* 
 
 THE FORGOTTEN WOMAN 
 
 HAVE said elsewhere that the people 
 of Evanston had the art of being en- 
 tertaining, and I find its origin here. 
 In the management of the affairs of the plan- 
 tation, the man's business life was not apart 
 from, but a part of that of his wife and 
 daughters. The best development of both as 
 social beings comes when they grow side by 
 side in working out a common purpose. In 
 modern American life among the educated, 
 classes the tendencies are to separate the hus- 
 band and father from his wife and daughters, 
 often by widening the field of the man and 
 narrowing that of the woman. The wife ac- 
 cepts her fate, as a rule, or at most seeks to 
 enlarge her sphere of activity by engaging in 
 works of charity, or in clubs for mental im- 
 provement and entertainment, but the alert 
 and restless daughter of an active man of 
 affairs finds few opportunities for growth, and 
 little to satisfy the yearnings of every true 
 woman's soul to do and be something in the 
 world. Those of rich men are often accused 
 
86 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 of selling themselves and their wealth for a 
 title in the monarchies of Europe, but pene- 
 trating women writers of modern fiction are 
 beginning to show that while the traditions of 
 the old countries appeal to the imagination of 
 American women, they find their happiness 
 in the enlarged fields that are offered there 
 for participation in the management of their 
 husbands' estates, and the building up of the 
 fortunes of his house, when she is made to 
 realize that it is also hers. In contrast with 
 the impersonal and spasmodic charities she 
 has been taught to practice, she finds the per- 
 sonal care and moral regulation of a neglected 
 tenantry. In place of the aimless and desul- 
 tory reading and study of a city book club, 
 she finds need for the highest culture and best 
 mental equipment for maintaining herself in 
 a society where the women are the compan- 
 ions and co-workers of the men in the en- 
 larged fields of statecraft and the delicate 
 duties of diplomacy. 
 
 At Deer Ponds the women of the house- 
 hold took as much interest in politics as the 
 
The Forgotten Woman. 87 
 
 men, and entered into the discussions of every 
 subject that related thereto, and it is easy to 
 see how the art of social intercourse was de- 
 veloped out of the necessity to entertain the 
 numerous guests of the house. On the lady 
 of the house devolved also, jointly with her 
 husband, the care of one hundred and fifty 
 slaves — not only their physical well-being, but 
 their moral growth and improvement. 
 
 To the seller of cattle by the penful or the 
 car-load, the attachment of the owners to 
 the family cow is inconceivable, and the care 
 of yoked oxen that help us to bear our bur- 
 dens is unknown. To uninstructed childhood 
 the crack of the ringmaster's whip speaks 
 only of cruelty to the animals in the circus 
 ring. We know the New Englander through 
 his persistance in writing about himself, but 
 he never knew us, or if he did he kept that 
 knowledge to himself, for reasons of his own. 
 Certain it is that his readers in the growing 
 Middle West, made up of his own descend- 
 ants and of foreigners from Europe, heard 
 nothing but the crack of the ring-master's 
 
88 Tlie Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 whip, but were never allowed to go behind the 
 scenes for a glimpse at the tender care, the 
 long hours of training, the unrelenting 
 patience that even the rough people of the 
 circus give to their animals. 
 
 Over against the most brilliant canvases 
 painted by the most skilful artists, but ser- 
 vants of a cause, if not adherents of a fan- 
 aticism of a period now long past, I would 
 set this simple sketch which, if not painted 
 by a master's hand, shows no line that is not 
 true; which, if not representing the whole 
 scene, depicts no isolated phase of it, but is one 
 among many thousands seen by sunlight and 
 by torch-light in cabins here and elsewhere 
 throughout the Southern States : 
 
 In the circular group of tall cedars that 
 stood in front of the house, a temple not 
 made with hands, sat a middle aged woman 
 with iron gray hair and gentle face. Around 
 her chair are grouped in respectful attitudes 
 three score negro men and women in clean 
 simple clothes, with a predominance of white 
 about their black faces. On her knee rests an 
 
The forgotten Woman. 89 
 
 open Bible, the simple truths of which she 
 is undertaking to explain to childish minds. 
 She is no preacher, but God has given her 
 these simple souls to keep and train, and out 
 there under the cedars, close to the earth, 
 she points to the blue sky and tells them of 
 a place of rest that comes at last to all who 
 follow Him. And when their eyes grow 
 heavy, she leads them off into one of those 
 giand old hymns which carry on the wings 
 of song the message of consolation and hope 
 that often finds no other entrance to simple 
 souls. Then all heads are bowed save one. 
 On that pale up-turned face the sunlight is 
 playing, God's smile through the rifts in the 
 swaying cedars. 
 
 This is the forgotten woman. She did not 
 appear in the pictures painted in the literature 
 of the times. If she had, the man in the 
 sombrero hat, with the long lash in his hand, 
 would have been unnoticed, and there might 
 have been— I had almost said there would 
 have been — no war. 
 
 There were four million slaves in the South 
 in i860. Allow a hundred to the family— and 
 
90 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 the average was nothing Hke so large as this 
 — and we have forty thousand famihes. Cut 
 the number in two, and twenty thousand for- 
 gotten Christian women were looking after 
 the physical and spiritual welfare of the negro 
 race — forgotten or unknown by her hundred 
 thousand Christian sisters in the North, amid 
 the shouts of the demagogue who sought to 
 obscure the South's contention for local self- 
 government by the cry for the abolition of 
 Slavery; forgotten or uncounted as the spirit- 
 ual force that inspired and upheld the most 
 effective soldier that ever fought in any war; 
 forgotten or underestimated as the power that 
 held in check four million slaves for two 
 years after they had been declared emanci- 
 pated by the government that had authorized 
 their enslavement, and again forgotten or un- 
 reckoned as the one uncrushed spirit in the 
 hour of defeat — forgotten there as a Chris- 
 tian worker, and not reckoned as the unbreak- 
 able support of her husband's and father's 
 right arm raised in defence of the home. 
 She is passing now, this woman who was 
 
The Forgotten Woman. 91 
 
 so completely forgotten or never revealed 
 there, who is cherished here as the best pro- 
 duct of our civilization. Men of all types 
 bare their heads before her as they do in the 
 presence of no one else on earth. 
 
 The finely courteous manners of the so- 
 called ''Gentlemen of the old School" were 
 not of his making but were created by the 
 profound respect her high-bred purity and 
 dignity habitually commanded. She is pass- 
 ing, but she still stands for the best there is in 
 Christian womanhood — the salt of the earth, 
 the hope of our world. 
 
 To the work this forgotten woman did 
 there is at least one unprejudiced witness who 
 comes neither from New England nor the 
 South. I again quote from the eminent Eng- 
 lish scientist, Sir Henry Lyell, a man who 
 spent his life in the search for truth, the ex- 
 tract being from his book of travels in the 
 Southern States in the year 1846. He says: 
 
 "Already their taskmasters have taught 
 them to speak, with more or less accuracy, one 
 of the noblest of languages, to shake off many 
 superstitions, to acquire higher ideals of mor- 
 
92 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 ality and habits of neatness and cleanliness, 
 and have converted thousands of them to 
 Christianity. Many have been emancipated, 
 and the rest are gradually approaching to the 
 condition of the ancient serfs of Europe, half 
 a century or more before their bondage died 
 out. All of this has been done at an enormous 
 sacrifice of time and money; an expense in- 
 deed, which all the governments of Europe 
 and all the Christian missionaries, whether 
 Romanist or Protestant, could never have 
 effected in five centuries. Even in the few 
 states which I have already visited since I 
 crossed the Potomac, several hundred thou- 
 sand whites of all ages, among whom the 
 children are playing by no means the least 
 effective part, are devoting themselves with 
 greater or less activity to these involuntary 
 ediicational exertions." 
 
 But these and other things written and 
 quoted herein are not written in defence of 
 the institution of slavery. It was wrong, 
 wrong, my children; but not any more wrong 
 than that other legalized practice of buying 
 from kidnappers and selling in the slave mark 
 
71ie Forgotten Woman. 93 
 
 ets that may have stood on Boston Common 
 and certainly did stand at the foot of Wall 
 street in the city of New York, the helpless 
 victims of man's rapacity; not any more 
 v^rong than to sell a chattel, and when, by 
 care or by new conditions, it became an in 
 strument of wealth and power, to seek b^ 
 force to deprive the buyer of the very instru- 
 ments out of which the sellers had made the 
 profits of barter; wrong it was and is to hold 
 a human being in bondage, but not any more 
 wrong than to make a free man a slave. Lib- 
 erty is lost when the shackles are clasped. 
 There could never have been negro slavery 
 without the negro trader, and his place of 
 residence was that on which his offspring, the 
 Abolitionist, was born. 
 
 It is not inconceivable that the same dollar 
 bill or silver coin that was paid to the negro 
 trader of Boston for an African slave was 
 again paid to publish Abolitionist literature. 
 
 I quote from no partisan source but the 
 highest tribunal in the land, the Supreme 
 Court of the United States, in the Dred Scott 
 decision, concurred in by seven of its nine 
 
94 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 judges, these words: 
 
 "In that portion of the United States where 
 the labor of the negro race was found to be 
 unsuited to the climate and unprofitable to 
 the master, but few slaves were held at the 
 time of the Declaration of Independence; and 
 when the Constitution was adopted it was 
 entirely worn out in one of them, and meas- 
 ures had been taken for its gradual abolition 
 in several others. But this change had not 
 been produced by any change of opinion in 
 relation to this race, but because it was dis- 
 covered from experience that Slave labor was 
 unsuited to the climate and productions of 
 these states; for some of these states, when 
 it had ceased or nearly ceased to exist, were 
 actually engaged in the slave trade; procur- 
 ing cargoes on the coast of Africa, and trans- 
 porting them for sale to those parts of the 
 Union where their labor was found to be 
 profitable and suited to the climate and pro- 
 ductions. And this traffic was openly carried 
 on, and fortunes accumulated by it, without 
 reproach from the people of the states where 
 they resided." 
 
THE SPEAKING PORTRIATS 
 
 MONG other early recollections of 
 scenes and incidents at Deer Ponds is 
 that of a visit made to the house by 
 Judge Boutwell and his daughter Francis, 
 kins-people of the Arnolds, residents in the 
 North. The judge and Col. Arnold were of 
 approximately the same age — at all events 
 belonged to the same era. Stories handed 
 down from the other generation are still told 
 of the curiosity and interest of the Northern 
 relatives in all details of the management of 
 the farm and household, and of the discus- 
 sions between this man of New England stock 
 and his Southern kinsman which took place 
 every evening in the big hall, and often lasted 
 far into the night. 
 
 Of these discussions there are no reports, 
 and more's the pity, for the two men were 
 types of the sections in which they lived, 
 albeit branches from the same stem. Re- 
 flecting upon this fact, as I walked back and 
 forth in the big deserted house, my footfalls 
 resounding with the hollow, uncanny noise 
 
g6 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 that echoes from bare walls and uncarpeted 
 floors, I came at last to the room in which the 
 portraits had hung. I could see on the faded 
 walls the square outlines of the frames that 
 held the pictures of those two — Southerner 
 and New Englander — and as I looked, their 
 faces came back to my memory with a vivid- 
 ness that was startling — the one large-fea- 
 tured, heavy- jawed, loosely- jointed; the other 
 plump, crisp, closely-knit and keen-eyed. And, 
 although in quest only of facts, I was momen- 
 tarily lost in fancy, and fell to wondering what 
 .these two would say if they could return and 
 live a day in the future each had tried so 
 hard, in this very house, fifty years ago, to 
 foresee. With the faces before me there came 
 also in flash light, the moving picture of the 
 times in which they lived, that greatest crisis 
 in the life of the Republic, the final clash 
 of theories of government, giant spirits of 
 the air in conflict among the confusing smoke- 
 clouds of the approaching conflagration — all 
 visible to men like these who stood on the 
 
The Speaking Portraits. 97 
 
 housetops, but unseen by the restless pygmies 
 below who were kindling the fires. 
 
 Under the spell of this scene, I seemed to 
 see the big, strong lips of the Southerner 
 move, and to hear the deep voice utter, in 
 the oratorical style of the period, words like 
 this : 
 
 *'In the present day the battles of the strong 
 are waged in the marts of commerce, and in 
 the wider plains of industrial development, 
 with the result that, as a rule, our public men 
 do not now always reflect in their own per- 
 sons the full intellectual and moral strength 
 of the nation, or, if strong personalities do 
 appear, they often come with counting-house 
 training and undertake to apply to government 
 the principles of trade whose avowed pur- 
 pose is gain; or, worse still, as personal rep- 
 resentatives of a special group whose inter- 
 ests they seek to guard and subserve. An 
 aristocracy of birth typified, in its relations to 
 government, by the House of Lords of Eng- 
 land, is at least free from the purely com- 
 mercial principle, being measureably satisfied 
 
98 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 with its own conditions and surroundings, or 
 if these be unsatisfactory for lack of means 
 to support them, seeking rathei the remunera- 
 tions of office than the prostitution of a gov- 
 ernmental system to the gratification of per- 
 sonal wants. 
 
 "I grant you, sir, that the strength of a 
 democracy lies in the perfect development and 
 equal growth of each individual unit. Un- 
 questionably the community life of New Eng- 
 land tended to such development. The col- 
 onists were poor, and each member had to 
 work. With a free and intelligent people the 
 necessity to work stimulates labor-saving de- 
 vices, and, hence the origin and growth of 
 'Yankee ingenuity.' 
 
 ''Settling in communities for mutual pro- 
 tection, the interdependence of each individual 
 member was quickly recognized, and the 
 motto, 'In Union there is Strength,' had its 
 full exemplification, if not its origin, there. 
 Out of co-operation as a fixed principle and 
 the habit of work grew thrift, general educa- 
 tion and training, the savings bank, combina- 
 
The Speaking Povtraits. 99 
 
 tions of capital in factories, and the other 
 forces that go to make up commercial strength 
 and independence. The extension of com- 
 merce and any wide spread industrial growth 
 has been followed sooner or later the world 
 over by the development of letters. Hence, 
 the universities of Harvard, Yale and Prince- 
 ton, and the literature that came into exist- 
 ence in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. 
 *'But the same sunshine and rains from 
 heaven which produce the flowers and fruits, 
 ministers also to the production of the tares. 
 With the development of a manufacturing in- 
 terest, the greed of human nature demanded 
 a protective tariff, a plant whose hidden 
 roots extended to the remotest sections of the 
 Republic, and drew from the products of 
 agriculture the strength that belonged to that 
 branch of labor. By the power of an alchemy 
 within itself, this strength derived from the 
 products of the soil was added to the value 
 of the products of the factory. In the course 
 of time the agriculturist was forced to seek 
 other and richer fields in the south and west, 
 
100 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 the one set resorting to the use of slave labor, 
 and the other to the help that could be ob- 
 tained from the immigrant peasantry of 
 Europe. Left to themselves without the in- 
 tervention of a protective tariff law, the 
 growth might have been reasonably equal. By 
 the aid of this tariff have come combinations 
 and trusts, which, not only threaten the peace 
 of the country, but have stimulated for their 
 suppression the passage of laws inherently 
 unjust, but hysterically demanded by the exi- 
 gencies of a terrifying disease — laws of the 
 nature of anaesthetics, but in no sense spec- 
 ifics, and as full of danger to the state as the 
 excessive use of opiates is in the human body. 
 "The application of community laws and 
 restrictions, beginning with sanitary regula- 
 tions, limiting personal behavior to non-inter- 
 ference with the comfort or happiness of one's 
 rjeighbors — wise and necessary under the con- 
 ditions of community life — led on to taxation 
 for education, to further interference with 
 personal conduct, to the infliction of punish- 
 ments for the infraction of local ordinances 
 
Tlie Speaking Portraits. lOi 
 
 based on a narrow and provincial sentiment, 
 harsher than those in the statute books for 
 the suppression of crime; and, finally under- 
 taking to impose on the aggregation of States, 
 prohibitions and requirements affecting the 
 right of local self-government more tyranni- 
 cal than those which the Pilgrim Fathers 
 themselves fled from England to escape. 
 
 "It will, therefore, appear that while the 
 New England idea and the New England 
 methods tended to produce and distribute 
 wealth and general education, which are the 
 objects of Democracy and constitute its plea 
 for existence, this idea and these methods led 
 on to a Hmitation of individual liberty and 
 to vesting the State and the general govern- 
 ment with royal powers and paternal func- 
 tions. A man may become rich and intelli- 
 gent, but he loses the very power, riches and 
 intelligence give when he falls at the feet of 
 Mammon or sacrifices a principle of justice 
 for a theory of convenience. Commercial- 
 ism made New England, but she fell a victim 
 to its inquisitorial and sumptuary methods in 
 
I02 TJic Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 seeking to embody in the laws of the land the 
 rules of the factory and store/' 
 
 The result of the conflict both these men 
 had foreseen was not witnessed by this old- 
 time Southerner. He had sent into it four 
 sons, all of whom were officers. One fell at 
 the head of his regiment in the battle of the 
 A\'ilderness. A faithful slave brought from 
 another a blood-stained paper scrawled on the 
 Gettysburg battle field, with the w^ords : "Tell 
 my father I fell with my face to the enemy." 
 When still another, Welle ford Arnold, the 
 eldest of the five, was slain near his own 
 home by a marauding band of Unionists and 
 deserters, as already described in these 
 sketches, the brave old spirit sickened and 
 died, but made no sign. 
 
 His kinsman. Judge Boutwell, survived the 
 struggle and, after the cessation of hostilities, 
 gave clean clothes and money for transporta- 
 tion to another of the sons returning from the 
 prison on Johnson's Island. 
 
 Turning towards the wall on which the New 
 Englander's picture had hung I seemed to 
 
The Speaking Portraits. 103 
 
 hear him speak, in clear tones and with the 
 sharp contrasts lawyers are trained to make 
 in stating a case, his brief analysis as follows : 
 
 "Plantation life tended by its isolation to 
 develop independence, by its responsibilities, 
 strength and self-reliance, and by its leisure, 
 fixed principles for the building up of indi- 
 vidual character, and for draping itself with 
 the refinements of culture. Undoubtedly the 
 inevitable result of such influences is the pro- 
 duction of a refined social order and a high 
 class of citizenship. 
 
 "The instinct of the race for the betterment 
 of its condition leads it to look for its leaders 
 among the intelligent and refined, and the 
 history of the Republic shows that it was from 
 among this class came those who nurtured it 
 in the trying period of its adolescence. But 
 they failed when the life of the Republic be- 
 came more complex. Personal liberty and 
 non-interference on the part of the govern- 
 ment found here all the conditions for their 
 gi-owth, but individualism does not meet the 
 demands of a commercial and manufacturing 
 
104 ^^^^ Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 people. The give and take of community life 
 is essential to its growth. The one exalted 
 the individual and left him to work out his 
 own salvation. The other magnified the state 
 and relied upon the power of co-operation. 
 The one nurtured a class out of which grew 
 fine specimens of manhood and womanhood, 
 but it neglected the development of that other 
 class which was unable to work out its own 
 salvation. The other took from the richer in 
 taxes and gave to the poorer the education and 
 the training that utilized the talent of all for 
 the enrichment of the State as a whole. The 
 one conception was aristocratic and the other 
 was democratic. 
 
 "If democracy has its dangers, demanding 
 for its control a stronger government and 
 paternal care, aristocracy has demonstrated 
 its weakness since the days of Greece and 
 Rome, wherever called upon to deal with the 
 complexities of an enlarged national Hfe or to 
 resist the onslaught of an inferior race, inured 
 to the hardships of toil. 
 
 "I gladly admit the bucolic charm of the 
 
The Speaking Portraits. 105 
 
 plantation life of the South and the high 
 spirit and patriotism of its men and women to 
 whom the nation owes an everlasting debt of 
 gratitude. But the peculiar conditions of cli- 
 mate and soil induced the use of slavery which 
 touched its vital point and introduced a poi- 
 son that narrowed the vision of it's leaders 
 and colored their outlook on national ques- 
 tions. Before its effects were seen, the think- 
 ing men of the South had applied to the art 
 of manufacturing and commerce that breadth 
 of view and largeness of conception which a 
 life of comparative leisure and a contact with 
 broad acres may inspire. But the line of least 
 resistance was followed. Wealth came 
 through slave labor, and with it, self indul- 
 gence and absorption in the extension of agri- 
 culture. Manufacturing interests were al- 
 lowed to languish, being obscured by the 
 alluring possibilities of the single crop of 
 cotton, grown only in a comparatively small 
 area of the then known South, and demanded 
 by the entire world. 
 
 "When the centre of the sphere of influence 
 
io6 Tlie Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 in national affairs was shifted from Virginia 
 to tlie far South by the spreading out of en- 
 terprising and active planters over the alluvial 
 soil of that region, the nature of that influence 
 was changed. Smooth stones lie easily to- 
 gether, but the rugged and uneven characters 
 that plantation life had developed could only 
 be formed into a solid concrete by a powerful 
 cement. In the beginning it was a fine patriot- 
 ism developed out of British aggression and 
 a common pride in the construction of a 
 Republic, whose failure the old world every 
 where predicted. In the end it was a mixture 
 of the doctrine of state's rights, and a 
 self interest, forming an amalgam more pow- 
 erful in its cohesive quality than any elemen- 
 tal influence or theory of government recog- 
 nized in that period of our history. But it 
 was not a mere solid wall of defense that was 
 thus created. It was a live influence stirred 
 into activity by the strength of its individual 
 elements, and already trained to the exercise of 
 power in the aflairs of government, and stim- 
 ulated by the love of a social system full of 
 
The Speaking Portraits. 107 
 
 the charms of a patriarchal mode of Hfe. 
 
 "Southerners made a gallant fight of aggres- 
 sion to extend their theories, but they fell 
 before the increasing weakness of their sys- 
 tem from within ; they fell before the growing 
 strength of those who not only made our 
 curry-combs and our blacking-brushes, rais- 
 ing the art of manufacturing almost to a 
 science, but who also wrote our books; they 
 fell before the force of those who had fol- 
 lowed Thomas Carlyle's gospel of work a 
 century before it was enunciated; they fell 
 before the slow moral awakening to the inher- 
 ent wrong of slavery. They might have stood 
 in spite of the neglect of the laws that control 
 national growth; but they could not stand 
 against these and an eternal moral principle 
 recognized in every civilized country, except 
 the one which stood for freedom." 
 
 This is what these men in the portraits 
 might have said, bringing with them the mem- 
 ories of the times in which they lived, but it 
 is not what they would say if they had con- 
 tinued to live to this day. They would have 
 
io8 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 seen, as it has been given to their descendants 
 to see, that the poHcy of protection combined 
 with "Yankee ingenuity" has constructed a 
 machine so voracious and so magnetic that it 
 has drawn into its insatiable maw the most 
 virile blood of the land, so powerful that no 
 hand has been found strong enough to guide 
 it or snatch from under its crushing wheels 
 those who may stand in its path; that 
 strong and weak are relative terms, and 
 those who feared the tyranny of a central 
 government, because of its strength, are now 
 beginning to realize that it is barely strong 
 enough to control the different groups seek- 
 ing the mastery, one over the other, in the 
 mines of dazzling wealth our combined efforts 
 have uncovered; that the laws of political 
 economy actually no longer appear to apply 
 to the conditions that confront our law- 
 makers ; and no one man nor group of men 
 seem to have combined the ability and unsel- 
 fish patriotism to even devise a scheme of 
 finance that will meet the demands of the 
 times; that the members of the two great 
 
The Speaking Portraits. 109 
 
 political parties are unable to agree among 
 themselves on any definite policies, and, as 
 a result, it is no longer a question with the 
 individual as to which one he shall attach 
 himself, but which one has for its candidates 
 for office men who seem to be best fitted to 
 deal with the chaotic conditions and lead us 
 out into clear daylight. 
 
 On the other hand, they would have seen, 
 as it has been given to their descendants to 
 see, that in spite of this apparent confusion in 
 governmental affairs, the individual man was 
 never so strong in intelligence, opportunity 
 was never so great, the brotherhood of man 
 never so universally recognized, and that the 
 fruits of the gospel of work are ripening into 
 the triumphs of man over nature, and the 
 adaptation of her powers to his growth and 
 development. 
 
 Clasping hands, they would have agreed 
 that as from the loins of a king only may a 
 king come to rule over a monarchy, so true 
 Democracy must create the man who shall 
 control its tempestuous upheavals, and if it 
 
no The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 fail in this, it will fail in its mission. It will 
 not fail, but the longer the delay in his com- 
 ing, the greater will be the wrench to the 
 nation. He will not come to destroy by rev- 
 olution, but to save from anarchy. He will 
 not prate about lawlessness as some scribes 
 and Pharisees do, but uproot and expose its 
 cause which will often be found in the in- 
 justice of the laws themselves. He will not 
 fail to discover that old statutes obscured by 
 their very closeness to our eyes, are in their 
 very essence inequitable. He will show that 
 those who stand in fear of an overwhelming 
 growth of socialism have themselves prepared 
 the soil for the germination of its seeds by 
 the laws they have made for their own con- 
 venience and comfort. He will admit that 
 liberty of conscience is absolutely necessary 
 to human growth and human happiness, but 
 liberty of action must often be curtailed that 
 license may be restrained. He will show that 
 it is not liberty we need, for that we have, 
 but justice, and that the only way to find it is 
 to get all the facts ; it is the scientific way ; 
 
The Speaking Portraits. ill 
 
 it is the only true way; it is God's way, for 
 He Himself can be absolutely just only be- 
 cause His knowledge is perfect. 
 
 Where will he come from, this product of 
 two hundred years of democracy, of a thou- 
 sand years of struggle for justice, this man 
 who will be a type of the hundreds of others 
 to whom we may entrust our governmental 
 affairs? Who shall say that he will not come 
 from a town that did not grow? One thing 
 may with safety be predicted — that he will 
 be of Anglo-Saxon breed and environment — 
 this man of courage, of strength and of un- 
 limited capacity for service. 
 
AN OLD BREED IN NEW PASTURES 
 URED by the haze of my blue moun- 
 tains, I climb them, and from the porch 
 of a cottage built on one of the peaks 
 visible from some of the streets and house- 
 tops of Evanston, I can see back against an- 
 other range a group of brownish green fields, 
 in the midst of which the houses of the old 
 town appear. The haze that was here is there 
 now, but I see them because I know where to 
 look, and I know where to look because I 
 was born there. No true story of any peo- 
 ple was even told or written by an alien, as 
 no song of Italy ever came true from the 
 larynx of a Norseman. The haze which is 
 there hides from him everything except the 
 fire works, and distance deadens every sound 
 but those of the nature of explosions. 
 
 From this mountain peak, and through the 
 haze of the ten years intervening between the 
 first sketch and the last, I ask you to look 
 now at the last. The people are no longer 
 visible at this distance; we see only the out- 
 lines of things, bristling facts, results, and per- 
 
114 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 haps among these some sort of answer to a 
 question or two that may have been suggested 
 by those that have already been shown. 
 
 Here is one which stands out boldly, around 
 which several others seem to be grouped: 
 
 The day that President Lincoln's procla- 
 mation freeing the slaves became effective, 
 which was the day of the surrender of Lee's 
 army at Appomatox, there was not enough 
 money in Evanston and the surrounding 
 county to buy the freedmen one meal of corn- 
 bread and bacon, and not enough clothes in 
 the stores to cover their bodies with a single 
 garment. 
 
 Financial panics, with their Black Fridays, 
 hysteria and suicides, are but passing inci- 
 dents, the full tide and the recession in the 
 affairs of men, alongside of a catastrophe like 
 this. The call to arms had not been louder 
 than the appeal to sell everything and give 
 to the support of the new government. Nor 
 did this appeal meet with a response less ready 
 or less universal. All of this was lost when 
 the government fell. 
 
An Old Breed in Nezv Pastures. 115 
 
 Even the flood which lays bare the land 
 does not always destroy the treasure of its 
 people, and earthquake and fire are confined 
 to limited areas bordered by friendly neigh- 
 bors able to redeem the remnants, to buy 
 the labor of the destitute and open the door 
 of opportunity to all. 
 
 A less courageous or self-reliant people 
 would have despaired, but there were no sui- 
 cides, and, above all, no whining. Neither 
 was expected from those who had the hardi- 
 hood to enter upon a war without a treasury, 
 and who undertook to fight without a battle- 
 ship or a transport, without guns enough to 
 equip the volunteer fighting force, and with- 
 out a gun factory or a powder mill south of 
 the Mason and Dixon's line. For this we 
 would call them foolish now ; they were con- 
 sidered foolish then by those who stopped to 
 count the cost, but by this sign every martyr 
 is a fool and every sacrifice a folly. 
 
 Despair and hopelessness do not come to 
 those who know or have learned how to en- 
 
ii6 TJie Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 dure. They are the heritage of pensioners 
 and dependants. 
 
 Here is another bristling fact that stands 
 out in spite of the haze: More than three 
 bilhons of dollars have been paid out in pen- 
 sions throughout the North and West to those 
 who fought on the side of the Union. To ap- 
 preciate what this means, one has but to re- 
 member that it would give fifty dollars to 
 every man, woman and child in the country 
 at the time of the distribution of this sum, 
 as the average population of the United States 
 in the past forty years is below sixty millions. 
 But since practically one-third of the popula- 
 tion is Southern and received nothing, the 
 other two-thirds received seventy-five dollars 
 per head. Then again, since the average date 
 of payment of something like half of this was 
 twenty years ago, the recipients have had 
 the use of this fund for that period. Money 
 invested at a low rate of interest doubles it- 
 self in that time. But this is not all: The 
 dollar that was paid twenty to forty years 
 ago had several times the purchasing power 
 
An Old Breed in New Pastures. 117 
 
 i<" has today and brought double the interest. 
 Not a single one of these dollars came to the 
 town of Evanston. On the contrary, its peo- 
 ple, with those of hundreds of towns and a 
 thousand counties in the Southern States hav- 
 ing no protected industries, paid it in tariff 
 and internal revenue taxes, and got nothing 
 in return. 
 
 The amount they w^ould have received 
 on an equal apportionment, to say nothing of 
 what they paid, would have cancelled a thou- 
 sand debts, filled the county with the best 
 agricultural implem,ents and endowed its 
 schools, even as it has done in the sections 
 where it was distributed. But this is one 
 kind of growth that never came to the town 
 of Evanston. They had never been receivers 
 of the Government's tips or beneficiaries under 
 a system in which an itching palm is extended 
 for a reward that has not been earned, and 
 still believe that the care of a cripple is a 
 duty of the State, and the nurture of an 
 orphan a privilege of the strong, but the sup- 
 port of the pensioner — now become a beggar 
 
ii8 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 on horseback — to the third and fourth genera- 
 tion of them that lost a leg, is an injustice to 
 every American citizen and an injury to 
 American citizenship. 
 
 There was no lawful money in Evanston 
 and the surrounding county, but there was 
 still some meat in the smokehouses and some 
 corn in the cribs. These the freedmen must 
 have, or starve. A crop-sharing arrangement 
 was quickly entered into by which the owners 
 of the meat and bread, and also the land, ad- 
 vanced the food until another crop could be 
 made, and supplied the implements and such 
 stock as the invading army had not taken, 
 consisting for the most part of the lame, the 
 halt and the blind. It was an emergency 
 measure, but time offered no relief. Neither 
 party to the arrangement could escape, un- 
 profitable to the land owner as it was, and 
 unsatisfactory as it appeared to the black 
 man who wanted some visible evidence of 
 his freedom and independence. In lieu of 
 these he adopted the petty methods of diso- 
 bedience to orders, frequent absences and 
 
An Old Breed in Nezv Pastures. 119 
 
 other forms of annoyance known to a serving 
 class, but rarely insolence. Of the part played 
 in the encouragement in these methods by the 
 agents of the Freedman's Bureau, I say noth- 
 ing, as I am not writing general or political 
 history. 
 
 If the black man was becoming a burden 
 as a slave, he was felt to be an incubus now, 
 after ten years of freedom. The sale or divis- 
 ion of the farms was out of the question. 
 Neither the landlord nor the freedmen had 
 accumulated a surplus. It would be a tribute 
 to the time-honored pursuit of agriculture that 
 it afforded even a subsistence to the popula- 
 tion under conditions of operation which 
 would bankrupt two-thirds of the manufact- 
 uring enterprises of the country to-day, but 
 for the unremembered fact that such sub- 
 sistence was obtained at the expense of the 
 land which was becoming exhausted and 
 was gradually abandoned for new ground 
 cleared from the abundant forests. If we 
 ask for an explanation of the broomsedge 
 fields of the South, it is found here. The 
 
120 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 new ground where the crops are made is 
 further back from the highways and the rail- 
 roads. 
 
 And so it was that nobody grew but the 
 boys and girls, but while they grew Evanston 
 and other towns similarly situated fell one 
 generation behind in the growth of the coun- 
 try at large, just as hundreds of the thriving 
 towns in any vast territory of our country to- 
 day would stop growth for a generation if 
 every factory should be deprived of its tools, 
 every store of its goods, every individual of 
 every dollar he possessed, so that even the 
 abandoned factory and the empty store could 
 not be sold for any sum, however small. 
 
 Here was a problem for statesmen, which 
 like many others, was solved first by the peo- 
 ple. The process was slow, but so are all 
 the processes of nature that are constructive. 
 It was also quiet — so quiet that it escaped the 
 notice of historians, and those who were 
 there did not see it. I asked the man of fifty 
 years of age who sat by me on the porch of 
 the mountain cottage, who had when a boy 
 
An Old Breed in New Pastures. 121 
 
 roamed with me over the brownish green 
 fields we both could now see, and sounded 
 the depths and shoals of the river that encir- 
 cles them. He said he didn't know. 
 
 "You were there" I said "when the land 
 and the tools began to wear out and when 
 the stock had run down. What did you do?" 
 
 "I went to work," was the prompt reply. 
 
 "And your brothers and sisters?" 
 
 "We all worked." 
 
 I did not ask him what followed, for this 
 I knew. The breed was there, but the pasture 
 being poor, he had sought other fields, and to 
 the new work of manufacturing he brought 
 the strength of a powerful body and that 
 gameness in the blood that carried him to the 
 head of a vast enterprise. In the prosperous 
 town where he now lives a stone church has 
 been built as a memorial to his mother and 
 father and in gratitude for the strength of 
 body and soul they had given him. 
 
 It had fallen in his way, along with his 
 mammoth undertakings in other parts of the 
 country, to reorganize and enlarge one of the 
 
122 The Breed and The Pasture. 
 
 enterprises that had been started in the town 
 of Evanston through the activity of its leading 
 citizens, and I could see that its growth gave 
 him more satisfaction than any other with 
 which he was connected. He was helping to 
 keep open the door of opportunity to the boys 
 and girls of his native town — the town that 
 did not grow, but is growing now because it 
 is able to keep both its boys and girls at home. 
 He did not know how the growth began, as he 
 could not have told him he forged to the head 
 of the leading industry in the State. He 
 would have only said that he kept on work- 
 ing. But it was such men as he who showed 
 that there were resources in forests and 
 streams as well as in the farm, and that the 
 factory and the farm grow best when along- 
 side of each other, both contributing to make 
 commerce, and all to the utiHzation of every 
 form of talent — to growth for all, because the 
 pastures are new and abundant. 
 
 The passage from one form of civilization 
 old as feudalism, to another whose basic prin- 
 ciple was widely different, was long and rough, 
 
An Old Breed in New Pastures. 123 
 
 the crew was of mixed nationalities and those 
 of a kind were not all of the same class — a 
 disfranchised ex-slave holder, an enfran- 
 chised ex-slave and the small farmer or mer- 
 chant or mechanic who had not been able to 
 acquire slaves — aristocrat, freedman and dem- 
 ocrat — culture and intelligence, ignorance and 
 incapacity, strong yeomanry in sympathy with 
 aristocracy and prejudiced against freedmen 
 — all in one boat acting under general orders 
 from the central government at Washington 
 still dazed by the heat and excitement of the 
 struggle, the cause of which was never fully 
 comprehended, suspicious of an enemy never 
 understood, bent upon the enforcement of the 
 one manifest result which was the enfran- 
 chisement of the slave. 
 
 The social problems were difficult enough, 
 but would have found a solution had they 
 not been complicated by political questions. 
 The navigation of the ship naturally fell into 
 the hands of the old masters. There was 
 mutiny of course and harsh measures had to 
 be resorted to. Those who by training and 
 
124 The Breed and The Pasture, 
 
 native strength took command, being agreed 
 that there are some few things dearer than 
 life, permitted harsh measures, ordered them, 
 and then threw themselves into the breach 
 between two races to ward off collision. Re- 
 ports of discipline, called lawlessness on land, 
 reached unfriendly shores, always; those of 
 the courage, the kindness and the sacrifices 
 rarely did. Punishment was allowed to fall 
 on individuals to preserve the peace of the 
 ship, but the old masters stood between to pre- 
 vent annihilation. They are still standing be- 
 tween, and there will be no collision, at least 
 not now, and not at all, unless the status of 
 the crew is not fixed before the commanding 
 but kindly eye of the last of them is closed. 
 
 When we come to set up a standard of 
 American citizenship — and surely we should 
 some day have a standard — when we come to 
 select here and there all the qualities that go 
 to make up a man, it will be discovered that 
 many of them had already been combined in 
 him. It has been said that he has lost the 
 larger outlook upon our National life. If he 
 
An Old Breed in New Pastures. 
 
 125 
 
 has, it was because he reorganized the broader 
 principle that Government is made for man 
 and not man for Government. 
 
EEC gO'^' 
 
One copy del. to Cat. Div. 
 
 JAM 20 JBia