"I KNOW DEAR FATHER WAS A GREAT MAN AND KNEW
MOST EVERYTHING, BUT I DIDN'T KNOW HE
HAD GOD'S EYES AND COULD
SEE EVERYTHING"
To my query whether he had done anything else by the way which his dear father had not seen, he replied:
"Yes; I threw Branch Barksdale's hat over the fence, and I wouldn't have been home yet if he hadn't chased me."
Charlotte Cushman was with me at the time and I had an amusing illustration of the way in which she unconsciously threw herself into a situation.
"Poor little man! Poor little man!" she said in her deep sympathetic voice, as she observed the bewilderment of the child, expressed in every line of his tense little body, his puckered features and bent fingers. "His little brain is all puckered up, too. He can't understand how this thing should have come to him. Poor little man! It is wicked to mystify him so—bless his little heart!"
In her sympathy she had assumed the pose of the bewildered child, and her face and hands were "puckered up," as she had described his brain.
This was Miss Cushman's last visit to Richmond, when she came as a reader, having left the dramatic stage. When I first knew her she was at the height of her wonderful career as an actress. I met her at the house of a friend, and she often visited me when in Richmond. She became very fond of our children and they were fascinated by her. My little Corbell asked her:
"What is the use of acting? Why don't you be it—just be it?"
"Ah," she replied, "there is the trouble. I do 'be it,' my child. There is where strength and vitality go—in just being it."