"Honey, don't fergit de ole man en bring him sump'n, en remember you's born but you ain't dead yit."
Others of the servants came with blessings and farewell gifts. Mary-Frances, who always received more presents than her twin sister and was noted for her stinginess, bade me a pathetic good-bye, assuring me that she was "gwine to be good en 'vide her light'ood and things wid Arabella." As I had disapproved of her selfish refusal to share her "light'ood" with her sister she thought this promise of generosity would be the best gift she could bestow upon me as a parting keepsake.
After tender farewells from mother, sisters, and brothers I started off with my father on what seemed to me a long, long journey.
At Richmond a man in uniform boarded the train. I looked at him with admiration as he came down the aisle. He was tall and walked erectly with graceful carriage and a commanding air not dependent upon his military dress. He stopped and spoke to my father, who arose, greeted him cordially and, turning back the seat, invited him to join us. He accepted and my father introduced "Colonel Robert E. Lee." The Colonel shook hands with me in a gentle way and began to barter for one of my long curls. In my diffidence I did not close with any of his offers, though I would have given every curl on my head for the asking, for even then, to my romantic vision, Colonel Lee was a hero.
He said that he had just returned from Harper's Ferry, where there had been great excitement. John Brown had descended upon the town and taken possession of the United States Arsenal. Colonel Lee, home on furlough from the West, had been sent with the marines from the Washington barracks and four companies of troops from Fortress Monroe to dispossess them and restore quiet to the little town in the Virginia hills. It was not alone Harper's Ferry that had been terrorized; the entire state had been thrown into a turmoil of excitement.
To a child whose infancy had shuddered at the story of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1832, the John Brown raid in 1859 was a subject of horrible fascination, and I listened intently as Colonel Lee talked of this strange old fanatic and his followers.
"What do you think would be the effect upon the negro, Mr. Corbell," Colonel Lee asked my father, "if we should be compelled to hang John Brown?"
My father replied, "Well, I've thought of that, too, Colonel, and I asked my foreman, who is a representative of his race, if he did not think we ought to hang old John Brown." He looked at me earnestly for a while then, shaking his head slowly, said, "I knows, Marse Dae, dat po' Marse John done en bruk de law, killin' all dem mens; but den, Marse Dae, even ef po' Marse John did bre'k de law, don't you think, suh, dat hangin' him would be a li'l abrupt?"
Colonel Lee laughed and replied, "I think that just about expresses the sentiment not only of the colored people but of many others." They agreed that John Brown was an honest, earnest, courageous old man and that his friends ought to put him where he would be cared for.