As this is my first, and will probably be my last attempt at authorship, in deference to the possibly too partial judgment of friends, I have ventured to include in the volume two additional sketches in no way connected with the memories, which precede them. Yielding to the same kindly criticism I have added also a war poem, intended to perpetuate an incident whose hardly paralleled pathos has not, I trust, been marred by the poetic dress in which I have attempted to preserve it.

ONE OF MY HEROES.

Personal courage, when from the lack of selfish ends, it rises to the plane of real chivalry, has always met with willing homage from the hearts of men. I do not know that hero-worship has entered largely into my own mental or moral makeup, and yet for thirty years and more my heart has paid its silent and yet earnest tribute to one, who in unadulterated grit and innate chivalry was the peer of any man I have ever known. I have called him my hero, but he was mine, perhaps, only by right of discovery. I found him in a little Florida village in the winter of '66. There was nothing in his appearance to indicate the hero. No title, civil or military added dignity to his name. So far as I know no stars or bars had gilded the old grey uniform he had laid aside with Lee's surrender. He was simply plain Bob Harrison. Of his lineage or earthly history I learned but little. I know that he was the son of a Methodist minister who, some years before, had moved to Florida from South Carolina, and who, by right of apostolical succession, was not only a good preacher but a good fisherman as well. I know, further, that in one of the battles in Virginia my friend had been shot through the lungs and had been left upon the battlefield to die.

The surgeons in their hurried rounds passed by on the other side, declining to waste their time on one, who in a few short hours would be beyond the reach of human aid. Despairing of any relief from them, he had tied his handkerchief around his chest to staunch the life blood that was ebbing away, and through the long, long lonely night had waited for death or help to come. On the morrow the burial corps had found him still living, and in the hospital he was nursed back to partial health again. The press had placed his name among the dead, and far away in his Southern home loving ones mourned for him until one summer's day his feeble footsteps on the walk and his pallid arms about their necks brought to their hearts a resurrection just as real as that which gladdened Mary and Martha at the tomb of Lazarus. Of his service as a soldier I know no more than I have written. My claim for him is based upon incidents that occurred when the war had ended and his record as a soldier had been made up.

At the date and in the section of which I write the tide of lawlessness that followed in the wake of war had not yet reached its ebb. During my stay a party of toughs came to the village and for a week or more terrorized the place. An effort was made to secure their arrest by civil process, but from lack of nerve in the officers, or failure to secure a posse, the effort failed and the gang was having its own sweet will without let or hindrance.

At this juncture Bob Harrison rode into the village one day from his country home. The lady, at whose boarding house these men were stopping, told him of their misdoings. He was living six miles away and had no personal grievance against them. His wounded lung had never healed and frequent hemorrhages from it had paled the color in his cheeks and weakened a body none too strong when in perfect health. But the appeal stirred the chivalry of his nature and he did not hesitate a moment. He went to them and in vigorous English denounced their conduct as ungentlemanly and dishonorable and told them it must stop.

That afternoon a challenge came to him to meet them at a designated place next morning to answer for the insult he had given. He rode in before breakfast and at the appointed hour he was promptly on hand armed with a brace of pistols and a bowie knife. For three hours he offered satisfaction in any shape they chose to take it, and with any weapon they might select, but his nerve had cowed them and the offer was declined. Then he said to their leader, "You have been making threats against my friend, Charlie P— for some fancied wrong. He has a wife and children to mourn him if he falls. I have none. I stand in his shoes today and any satisfaction you claim from him you can get from me here and now." The bully failed to press his claim. The gang soon left the village and quiet reigned again.

A short time prior to this incident a young lady had made her home in the village—a stranger, without relatives or friends. A citizen of the place taking advantage of her unprotected condition, began to circulate rumors reflecting on her character. These reports reached Bob Harrison's ears. She was bound to him by no ties of blood or special friendship, but her helplessness was claim enough. He called on the author of the slander and asked to see him privately. The man showed him into a room and Bob locked the door and put the key in his pocket. "Now, Mr —," he said, "you have circulated slanders about Miss —. She has no relative here to protect her and I have come to put a stop to it. I don't propose to take any advantage of you. I am going to lay these two pistols on this table. You will stand with your face to that wall and I will stand with my face to this. When I give the word if you can secure a pistol first you are at liberty to shoot. If I get one first, I am going to shoot. You have got to do that or you have got to sit down at this table and sign a "lie bill." The man looked into Bob's eyes a moment and said, "I'll sign the lie bill," and Miss —'s name was safe from slanderous tongues from that day on.

In neither of these cases did he have the slightest personal interest.

His conduct was prompted solely by the chivalry of the man. He impressed me as ordinarily one of the gentlest and mildest mannered of men and yet I believe he would have led a forlorn hope to certain death without a tremor.

With the close of winter I returned to my Georgia home and over the gulf of silence that has intervened since that spring day in '67, no tidings have come to me of my friend, Bob Harrison. If he still lives my heart goes out in tender greeting to him today, and if he sleeps beneath the daisies I trust this little tribute to his worth will cause the sod that lies above him to press none the less lightly over his manly heart.

BEN HILL AND THE DOG.

A REMINISCENCE.

Just fifty years ago in the unceiled, unpainted and largely unfurnished rooms of an "Old Field School," holding a blue-backed speller in my boyish hands, I sat with a row of barefoot urchins on a plain pine bench and watched with sleepy eyes the mellow sunshine creeping all too slowly towards the 12 o'clock mark cut by the teacher into the school room floor. This primitive timepiece that marked the boundary line between school hours and the midday intermission, known in schoolboy vernacular as "playtime," was never patented, although it had the happy faculty of never running down and never needing repairs. To the student of today reveling in the luxuriant appointments of the present public school system there may come sometimes a touch of pity for the simple methods and the meagre equipment of the old field school, whose teachers in addition to the inconvenience of having to "board around," were sometimes forced to receive partial compensation for their work in home made "socks." Such of my readers as may be disposed to discredit the free and unlimited knitting of socks as a circulating medium for the payment of school salaries, are respectfully referred to my friend, W. J. Steed, for the historical accuracy of this statement.

And yet—and yet, minimizing as we may the limited advantages of those old school days in the '40's, and magnifying as we do the wondrous advance in educational methods and appliances in all grades from the kindergarten to the university, the fact remains that "there were giants in those days" who seem to have no successors. Examples might be multiplied both in our state and national life, but I give only two. The places of George F. Pierce in the pulpit and of Benjamin H. Hill in the forum and on the hustings have never been filled. It may be true that Dame Nature requires after the production of great men a period of repose and rest, and if my limited observation is not at fault she is enjoying a good long nap. Whatever may have been the explanation of the fact mentioned, the privilege of hearing these men in their palmy days, of feeling the "cold chills" creep up the spinal column as they soared to the empyrean heights of impassioned oratory, of losing consciousness of time and place and environment under the magic spell of their almost superhuman eloquence, furnished some measure of compensation for the meagre advantages, on educational lines, of the last generation.

The writer's first opportunity to hear Ben Hill occurred at Mount Moriah camp ground, in Jefferson county, in the presidential campaign of 1856. On the disintegration of the old Whig party Mr. Hill had aligned himself with its residuary legatee, the American party, and was canvassing the State as an elector on the Fillmore ticket. He was 33 years of age, just in the rosy prime of a superb physical and intellectual manhood. I was only a boy and knew nothing of parties or party politics, but I remember that for three hours and more he held the rapt and untiring interest and attention of that vast audience.

At the close of the speech Major Stapleton announced that a messenger had been sent to Mr. Stephens asking a division of time with Mr. Hill at the former's appointment in Burke county, on the next day. Mr. Hill was sitting on the pulpit steps, and when the announcement closed he said, "Yes, I am not afraid to meet "Little Aleck," nor big Aleck, nor big Bob added to them," alluding to Mr. Toombs. Mr. Stephens did not consent, but met Mr. Hill afterwards at Lexington, Ga., in the same campaign. Out of this debate grew Mr. Stephens' challenge and Mr. Hill's refusal to accept it, an incident which had large influence in ending the reign of the code duello in Georgia.

Two years later I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Hill again in the State campaign for governor. A joint canvass of the State had been in progress, but after a few discussions Governor Brown found that he was no match for Mr. Hill on the "stump," and he wisely cancelled further engagements. In giving his reasons for such action he said that Mr. Hill was too much of a sophist, that he could make the worse appear the better cause, and to enforce the point he related the "pig and puppy" anecdote, a favorite illustration with political speakers in those days. In the speech I refer to, delivered at Covington, Ga., Mr. Hill gave his opponent the benefit of a statement of the reasons he had assigned for his withdrawal, with the anecdote included, and then with the smile that always gave premonition of a happy retort, he said, "And now, fellow-citizens, in this campaign I have made no effort to make anything out of anybody but Mr. Brown, and if I have made nothing better than a pig or a puppy it was the best I could do with the material I had to work upon."

Mr. Hill never employed the anecdote argument in his speeches, but if used against him no man of his time or perhaps of any other time was able to turn its edge more readily or more effectively on his opponent I recall only one passage from the address and as it has not been preserved in his published speeches I give it in illustration of his style at that date. After disposing of his opponent and the State campaign he turned his attention to national issues and in urging his audience to resist Northern encroachments on their rights closed a burst of impassioned oratory with these words: "Has the spirit of Southern chivalry folded its wings for an eternal sleep in the grave of Calhoun? Shall the breezes, which blow from the 'cowpens' where the infant days of Jackson were spent, now fan the brows of a nation of slaves? Rise, freemen of Georgia! Arise in your might. Shake off this Delilah of party for she is an harlot and will betray you to your destruction. Arise! drive back the invader from your thresholds, or like Samson of old, pull down the pillars of the temple and perish in one common ruin." Its effect upon the audience may be inferred from the fact that it has lingered in my memory more than forty years. I heard Mr. Hill no more until some years after the war. His nerve in putting an end to the seizure of cotton by Federal agents in the South in '65, his "Davis Hall" and "Bush Arbor" speeches and his "Notes on the Situation" had given him the very highest place in Southern esteem and affection. And then came his acceptance of an interest in the State Road Lease and his speech at the "Delano Banquet," which placed him under the ban of popular distrust and postponed the day when Southern character and Southern history was to find its brave and complete vindication at his hands in the halls of Congress. During this shadowed period in his life I heard him several times in Atlanta, and on one of these occasions occurred the incident which forms the title of this sketch. Chafing under the criticisms and abuse to which he had been subjected he boldly defended the consistency of his record and pointed proudly to the day in '65 when the lips of every public man in Georgia were sealed except his own. "And now, my friends," said he, "when the lion of military government had prostrate Georgia in its cruel grasp, these men, who are now decrying me, were hiding away in quiet places afraid to face him. But when largely through my persistent efforts his clutch was loosened and he was recalled to his den in Washington, the whole breed,

left their hiding places and came out barking, not at the lion, but at me, yelping, "Radical!" "Radical!" "Radical!" The words had barely left his lips when a huge dog standing in the centre of the aisle, began barking loudly and vigorously, with his eyes fixed on Mr. Hill. I do not know that the speaker, in imitation of a certain minister's reputed habit of inserting, "Cry here," at the close of the pathetic passages in his manuscript, had inserted "Bark here" in his notes, but I do know that the impromptu illustration fitted in so pertinently that the storm of applause, that greeted it, would have lifted the roof if such a result had been possible. For several minutes there was perfect pandemonium. As the wave of sound rolled and swelled and rose and fell to rise in larger volume than before the speaker faced the audience with the shadow of a smile upon his face and when the last ripple of applause had died away he said: "My friends, I meant no reflection on that dog."

I have had the privilege of hearing Toombs, Stephens, Johnson and Howell Cobb, the first two, a number of times. I claim no ability to make intelligent comparison among these distinguished Georgians. But basing an estimate simply upon their effect upon myself and upon others as I have observed it, I should say that while in epigrammatic force, in the ability to pack thought into limited space, Mr. Toombs had no equal among them, yet in effective oratory, in the power to sway an audience at his will, whether in the domain of ice-cold logic or in the higher realms where only angels soar, Mr. Hill probably towered above them all. The peroration to his appeal for the pardon of Wm. A. Choice had few equals in all the range of English forensic literature. It has not been preserved, and in the forty years that have elapsed since its delivery, my memory retains but a single sentence, and with that I close this sketch: "Even from the lips of the murdered man, a voice comes back to us today, as soft as evening zephyrs through an orange grove and as warm as an angel's heart. 'Forgive him, save him, for he knew not what he did.'"

THE REBEL CHAPLAIN AND THE DYING BOY IN BLUE.

The touching incident recorded in the following verses occurred on a bloody Western battlefield in the old war days in the '60's. Rev. J. B. McFerrin, formerly of Nashville, Tenn., and now in Heaven, an able and honored minister of the Methodist church, and for four years a Confederate chaplain in the army of Tennessee, was the Christian hero of this tenderly pathetic story. His untiring devotion to the sick and wounded amid the dangers and hardships of camp and field are gratefully remembered by his surviving comrades, while his gentle kindness to a stricken foe, will be embalmed in the loving memory of every veteran of both the "Blue and Grey."

Transcriber's Note: Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been silently corrected in this HTML version.