"You see, I'm trying to give you an impression—a picture of a chap I believe to have been one of the truest gentlemen that ever came here—I feel you're entitled to know whose room it is you occupy and to share in these memories, which are, after all, the best thing left in my lonely old bachelor existence. When I tell you the rest and how we parted never to meet again you won't be able to get a true understanding of it unless you can grasp the real spirit of the times, the environment, the intensity of the whole affair.
"Here I was rooming with a flamboyant Southerner who fully intended to enlist as soon as his native State should declare herself, when four of my uncles had already joined the Union army. Of course I wanted to go, but my father wouldn't hear of it. The whole miserable business only drew Randolph and me the closer together. I do not think that his performance with the pistol had increased his popularity; in fact, the sympathies of the undergraduates seemed on the whole to be with Watkins, and the general sentiment that he was the aggrieved party. If Dick had taken his medicine in good part it would doubtless have been better for him in the end. You see, it gave his slanderers a handle and they made the most of it. Neither did he abate any of those idiosyncrasies of which I have spoken, but simply out of bravado, I suppose, rather let himself go. His cravats increased in brilliancy, his waistcoats multiplied their colors, and he was always careering around on Azam through the Yard and Harvard Square. He had a trick of riding suddenly out of nowhere, and appearing at recitations on horseback, turning his beast over to Moses at the door until the lecture had concluded. I have known Randolph at this period to keep his horse waiting an hour in order that he might ride him the length of the Yard. Don't get the impression that I am criticising him unfavorably; I am merely endeavoring to give you the point of view of the outsiders who didn't like him. By April the class was pretty evenly divided on the Randolph question. To half of us he was a rather Quixotic hero—to the rest a sort of cheap poseur. Watkins was untiring in his innuendoes, and in this he was aided to a considerable extent by the bitterness of the feeling between North and South. Of course, everything possible was being done to conciliate the Southern States, and it was the aim of the entire North to avert if possible an open rupture. At the theaters the most popular music was the old Southern airs and plantation melodies, and the audiences conscientiously cheered when 'Dixie' was played. Naturally this was vastly gratifying to Randolph, who failed, it seemed to me, to realize its significance. I don't think that anyone really believed actual hostilities would occur.
"Then like a lash across our faces came the firing on Sumter. The whole North gasped and then the blood boiled in our veins. Right here under these trees the war fever burned hottest.
"That night will never be forgotten by the class of '64. A huge gathering of students filled the Yard, lights twinkled in all the windows, torches flared here and there among the tree trunks, while between Stoughton Hall and where Thayer now stands, just in front of these very windows, the fellows concentrated in a solid mass, cheering the Union again and again, as flights of rockets burst high above the trees, sending down their floating canopies of sparks. Into that big elm, out there, some of the seniors were hoisting a transparency, bearing upon one side the words, 'The Constitution and Enforcement of the Laws,' and upon the other, 'Harvard for War.'
"I was sitting in this window—Randolph in that. Perhaps I should have been out on the grass shouting with the others, but the loneliest fellow in Cambridge was at my side. Poor old chap! No wonder he was gloomily silent. Outside the cheering continued and the rockets roared away over the tops of the old buildings, until the students, forming into an irregular procession, marched away singing patriotic airs, some to go to their rooms, but most to pass the remainder of the evening at the tavern, discussing the President's proclamation.
"Dick got up quietly and came over to the window. 'Jack,' he said sadly, 'the game's about up with me. I can't stay here any longer. Now that war is an actuality, I must go home, and the sooner the better.'
"'But Virginia hasn't seceded,' I answered, 'and most likely won't. If she does there will be time enough for you to go.'
"'Virginia will secede,' he replied, 'and blood will be shed in this cursed quarrel within two weeks. I can't stay here when I might be at home helping on the cause. I shall think you are acting from interested motives,' he added, smiling.
"'What does your mother say?'
"'That's the trouble. She wants me to stay.'