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of the most tactful persons I have ever known. She had a genius for getting on well with people even under the most trying circumstances.
    The stirring events of her young wifehood and mother-hoodafforded plenty of outlet for her energy, and in later and calmer times she found new means of expression. She studied French and music after she was forty, and she remodeled and built so many houses just for the enjoyment she got out of the planning that house building became almost a steady occupation with her.
    General Hindman and my father quarreled over a court martial. Some young soldiers had stolen away one night and visited their homes in the vicinity of the camp. They were brought back and charged with desertion. Father insisted that they were not deserters, that they were just homesick boys who would have returned of their own free will, and he refused to conduct the trial on that account. Because of this quarrel he left Hindman to join General John C. Breckinridge’s command near Atlanta.
    In two light wagons and a barouche the family and several servants, old Uncle Adam standing out most clearly in my memory, started on that journey. We crossed the Mississippi river at Napoleon and just as we landed on the Mississippi side a Yankee gunboat came into sight. If we had been a few minutes later, or the gunboat a few minutes earlier, my father undoubtedly would have been taken prisoner. We went to Yazoo City, thence in our vehicles across the State of Alabama, arriving at Atlanta by Christmas — the first Christmas of the war.
    I do not remember just how long we stayed in Georgia, but certainly more than a year, and most of that time at Milledgeville. One morning, much to my delight, I was permitted to hold in my arms the one-day-old son of the family with whom we were boarding. That baby is now William Gibbs McAdoo, famous for his successful promotion of New York City’s underground railways.
    When we left Georgia, we went north, through the Carolinas — most of the way by our own conveyances — to Corner Springs, Virginia, and later to Withville. While living at the former place I often saw detachments of Southern troops march by our house in the morning, and companies of Union soldiers pass in the afternoon of the same day. At Withville I had a terrible attack of typhoid fever, the first illness of my life. From Withville we went to Natural Bridge, where we spent a year or so, leaving here for Staunton just at the close of the war.
    Though my father had served in the Confederate Army throughout the whole of the conflict he was a great admirer of Lincoln and very much opposed to slavery, and many, many times, even while sectional feeling was most bitter, he told me that the South was fighting for an unjust cause. My own hatred of slavery in all forms is doubtless due to that early teaching which was the more effective because of the dramatic incidents connected with it. Father’s sympathies were with the North but loyalty to friends, neighbors and a host of relatives who were heart and soul with the South kept him on that side. Like so many of these he was now penniless, and I having attained the advanced age of eleven years commenced to look for something to do.
    Immediately after Lee’s surrender one railroad train a day commenced to run into Staunton, and I struck up a friendship with the conductor which was to prove not only immediately profitable to me, but which probably decided my future career. One day he said to me,
    â€œHow would you like to sell papers, Tom? I could bring ’em in for you on my train and I wouldn’t carryany for anybody else, so you could charge whatever you pleased.”
    The exciting events attending the end of the war naturally created a brisk demand for news and I eagerly seized this opportunity to get into business. The Richmond and Petersburg papers I retailed at fifteen cents each and for “picture papers,” the illustrated weeklies, I got