I shall feel at liberty to tell my story in my own way; rambling along at my own gait; now going from point to point; now tearing ahead; now stopping to rest or to ruminate, and even straying from the path whenever I think a digression will be for my own enjoyment.

I shall begin with my college career, a period to which I look back now with a pleasure wholly incommensurate with what I achieved in it; which I find due to the friends I made and to the memories I garnered there in a time when I possessed the unprized treasures of youth: spirits, hope, and abounding conceit. As these memories, with the courage (to use a mild term) that a college background gives, are about all that I got out of my life there, I shall dwell on them only enough to introduce two or three friends and one enemy, who played later a very considerable part in my life.

My family was an old and distinguished one; that is, it could be traced back about two hundred years, and several of my ancestors had accomplished enough to be known in the history of the State—a fact of which I was so proud that I was quite satisfied at college to rest on their achievements, and felt no need to add to its distinction by any labors of my own.

We had formerly been well off; we had, indeed, at one time prior to the Revolutionary War, owned large estates—a time to which I was so fond of referring when I first went to college that one of my acquaintances, named Peck, an envious fellow, observed one day that I thought I had inherited all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. My childhood was spent on an old plantation, so far removed from anything that I have since known that it might almost have been in another planet.

It happened that I was the only child of my parents who survived, the others having been carried off in early childhood by a scourge of scarlet fever, to which circumstance, as I look back, I now know was due my mother's sadness of expression when my father was not present. I was thus subjected to the perils and great misfortune of being an only child, among them that of thinking the sun rises and sets for his especial benefit. I must say that both my father and mother tried faithfully to do their part to counteract this danger, and they not only believed firmly in, but acted consistently on, the Solomonic doctrine that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. My father, I must say, was more lenient, and I think gladly evaded the obligation as interpreted by my mother, declaring that Solomon, like a good many other persons, was much wiser in speech than in practice. He was fond of quoting the custom of the ancient Scythians, who trained their youth to ride, to shoot, and to speak the truth. And in this last particular he was inexorable.

Among my chief intimates as a small boy was a little darkey named "Jeams." Jeams was the grandson of one of our old servants—Uncle Ralph Woodson. Jeams, who was a few years my senior, was a sharp-witted boy, as black as a piece of old mahogany, and had a head so hard that he could butt a plank off a fence. Naturally he and I became cronies, and he picked up information on various subjects so readily that I found him equally agreeable and useful.

My father was admirably adapted to the conditions that had created such a character, but as unsuited to the new conditions that succeeded the collapse of the old life as a shorn lamb would be to the untempered wind of winter. He was a Whig and an aristocrat of the strongest type, and though in practice he was the kindest and most liberal of men, he always maintained that a gentleman was the choicest fruit of civilization; a standard, I may say, in which the personal element counted with him far more than family connection. "A king can make a nobleman, sir," he used to say; "but it takes Jehovah to make a gentleman." When the war came, though he was opposed to "Locofocoism" as he termed it, he enlisted as a private as soon as the State seceded, and fought through the war, rising to be a major and surrendering at Appomattox. When the war closed, he shut himself up on his estate, accepting the situation without moroseness, and consoling himself with a philosophy much more misanthropic in expression than in practice.

My father's slender patrimony had been swept away by the war, but, being a scholar himself, and having a high idea of classical learning and a good estimate of my abilities—in which latter view I entirely agreed with him—he managed by much stinting to send me to college out of the fragments of his establishment. I admired greatly certain principles which were stamped in him as firmly as a fossil is embedded in the solid rock; but I fear I had a certain contempt for what appeared to me his inadequacy to the new state of things, and I secretly plumed myself on my superiority to him in all practical affairs. Without the least appreciation of the sacrifices he was making to send me to college, I was an idle dog and plunged into the amusements of the gay set—that set whose powers begin below their foreheads—in which I became a member and aspired to be a leader.

My first episode at college brought me some Éclat.