They were whites, and church members in good and regular standing.
Little Edgar died the day after my father took the train from Richmond for the fast run through to Boston—in two days and two nights! When the master got home after a month’s absence, the funeral sermon was preached in old Petersville Church, three miles from the Court House, on a Sunday afternoon, and the parents and elder children were conveyed thither in the family carriage, driven by Spotswood, who would now be the “coachman.” Then he was the “carriage-driver.” They took time for everything then-a-days, and plenty of it.
In September, Mea and I had the culmination of our experiences and “privileges” upon College Hill in the Hampden-Sidney Commencement. I had never attended one before. I have seen none since that were so grand, and none that thrilled me to the remotest fibre of my being as the exercises of that gloriously cloudless day. I hesitate to except even the supreme occasion when, from a box above the audience-floor packed with two thousand students and blazing with electric lights, I saw my tall son march with his class to receive his diploma from the president of a great university, and greeted him joyfully when, the ceremonial over, he brought it up to lay in my lap.
There were but four graduates in that far-off little country college with the hyphenated name and the honored history. It may be that their grandchildren will read the roll here: Robert Campbell Anderson, Thomas Brown Venable, Paul Carrington, and Mr. Rice, whose initials I think were “T. C.” There were, I reiterate, but four graduates, but they took three honors. Robert Anderson was valedictorian; Mr. Rice of the uncertain initials had the philosophical oration; Tom Brown Venable had the Latin salutatory; and Paul Carrington, the one honorless man, made the most brilliant speech of them all. It was a way he had. The madcap of the college—who just “got through,” as it were, by the skin of his teeth, by cramming night and day for two months to make up for an indefinite series of wretched recitations and numberless escapades out of class—he easily eclipsed his mates on that day of days. The boys used to say that he was “Saul,” until he got up to declaim, or make an original address. Then he was “Paul.” He was Pauline, par éminence, to-day.
I could recite verbatim his lament over Byron’s wasted powers, and I see, as if it were but yesterday that it thrilled me, the pose and passion of the outburst, arms tossed to heaven in the declamation:
“O! had his harp been tuned to Zion’s songs!”
Music was “rendered” by an admirably trained choir. The hour of the brass-band had not come yet to Hampden-Sidney. And the choir rendered sacred music—such grand old anthems as,
“Awake! awake! put on thy strength, O Zion!
Put on thy beautiful garments”;
and,