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Denver, came.
    My earliest recollections are of events connected with the war, though an incident which happened the year before seems very clear in my mind. Just how much of it I actually remember, however, and how much of it is due to hearing it often repeated I cannot say. But what happened was this: Joe Pilcher and I were playing on the floor with a Noah’s Ark and a most wonderful array of little painted animals. These toys were made by the prisoners in the penitentiary at Nashville, where my mother had purchased them for me on our way South to our summer home, a plantation in Arkansas. After infinite pains and hours of labor my playmate and I had arranged the little figures in pairs, according to size, beginningwith the elephants and ending with the beetles, when one of the young ladies of our household, dressed for a party, crossed the room and with her train switched the lines to hopeless entanglement in the meshes of the long lace curtains, two of the animals only remaining standing. Joe, who was somewhat my senior, burst into tears, while I smiled brightly and said:
    â€œDon’t cry, Joe; there are two left anyhow.”
    My mother never tired of telling this story and its frequent repetition certainly had a marked influence upon my life, for it established for me, in the family, a reputation as an optimist which I felt in honor bound to live up to somehow. I early acquired a kind of habit of making the best of whatever happened.
    In later life larger things presented themselves to me in exactly the same way. Nothing was ever entirely lost. There was no disaster so great that there weren’t always “two left anyhow.” My reputation for being always cheerful in defeat — a reputation earned at such cost that I may mention it without apology — is largely due to this incident, trivial though it may seem.
    I remember the beginning of the war very well and am sure that from this time my recollections are actual memories, not family traditions.
    As his first service to the Confederacy my father, a slave owner and cotton planter, organized a military company at Helena, Ark., of which he was Captain. Becoming Colonel in command of a brigade under General T. C. Hindman a little later, one of his first duties was to execute the order to destroy all cotton likely to fall into the hands of the enemy. Though he was opposed to this policy he enforced the order with rigid impartiality, compellingmy mother, who had managed to hide some cotton in the cane-brake, to bring it out and have it burned as soon as he discovered her secret. The burning of this cotton made a great impression on my mind, especially the sorrow of the negroes who stood around the smouldering bales and cried like children at sight of the waste of what had cost them such hard work to raise.
    Shortly after this we moved to Little Rock and it was while we were living there that my mother shot a burglar who was trying to get into the house through a bedroom window. I recall this incident vividly. I can see the bed which my mother and the baby, Albert, occupied — with its white mosquito bar cover — in one corner of the room; against the opposite wall the bed in which my brother Will and I slept; the form of a man trying to climb through the window, and my mother’s upraised arm as she discharged a pistol at him. She didn’t hurt him much, but when he was captured in a similar attempt a few weeks later, the burglar admitted that he had gotten the wound in his leg from Mrs. Johnson.
    My mother was not only courageous and self-reliant, but remarkably independent in thought and in action. She cared so little for what people might think or say that having made a decision she acted upon it without further ado. If my own disregard of the things “they say” is an inheritance from my mother I am more grateful for it than for any other characteristic she may have given me. With all her independence, however, she was one