and hysterical sobbing, who usually gave way first and, like Abou ben Adhem, led all the rest. By the time the sermon was over she was about ready for the outburst, and when the exhorter broke loose with his "Glory halleluiah" song she would clap her hands violently together with a resounding smack, sway her body back and forth, and scream out at the top of her high-pitched voice: "Bless the Lord! Bless the Lord! Oh, my Jesus!" And with this she would follow on the trail of the exhorter, crying out to her two sons, about eighteen and twenty-two respectively, to "Come to Jesus." These young men, knowing their mother's weakness, found it convenient to sit near the door or an open window, through which a quick exit was possible when she began a rush for them. I remember on one occasion one of the boys reached the door and escaped, and the dear old lady cut the other off from that exit only to see him leap through a window at least six feet from the ground. With twenty or thirty mourners kneeling before the parallelogram of benches arranged for them just in front of the pulpit, many of these sobbing, the exhorters singing and shaking hands in and out among the congregation, and a half-dozen hysterical women shouting as loud as they could scream, confusion reigned. There was one young man whose fondness for alcohol caused him to fall from grace with recurring regularity, and his way of restoring himself to divine favor was to confess his errors at these revivals and ask to be taken back in the fold. He immortalized himself with the smaller boys in our neighborhood by breaking out on one occasion in an ecstasy of song which, as far as I knew, was entirely original. As the exhorter was on his rounds, Jasper leaped from his seat, grasped him by both hands, and, jumping up and down, not un like the movements of a turkey-gobbler in the early spring, chanted: The devil is dead, and I am glad; Glory halleluiah! He ain't got the soul he thought he had; My parents, being Presbyterians, did not wholly approve of these excitable religious demonstrations, and I did not attend as many as I should have liked. Their minister, who always stayed at our house, did not reach us in his circuit oftener than once in four or five weeks, and the intervening Sundays I spent in familiarizing myself with the Westminster Confession of Faith, the religious section of the New York Observer, and Alexander's Sermons, one of which I was called upon to stand up before the family and read aloud. How long each one of these effusions of the good old Princeton theologian seemed! Visiting in 1913, in one of the private rooms of the Polyclinic Hospital, a grandson of their author, himself eminent in the affairs of the metropolis, I was answered with a smile when I told him I rejoiced at last to have an opportunity of taking revenge on the family for the wrongs I had suffered at the hands of his grandfather. VII THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE OLD SOUTH It would be difficult to imagine a society more cultured, hospitable, and delightful, more in harmony with that definition of gentlefolk as "those whose rule of conduct is consideration for others," than that to which, thanks to my mother, I found admission in the community of Huntsville in the days of the old régime. This may savor of exaggeration or prejudice, or perhaps of conceit; but in the larger view which has come from reading and travel, and an association of more than forty years with many of the noblest and best of the metropolis, nothing like it has come to my knowledge. Such a society was possible only with the institution of slavery; and when slavery ended it ended never again to be reproduced. The people composing this society were almost wholly descended from the cavaliers of Virginia, many of the earlier settlers coming directly from the tide-water section of the Old Dominion; others indirectly, from Kentucky and Tennessee and North Carolina-countries which were stocked by the Virginia overflow. In the spirit of adventure, and with the wealth in slaves inherited from their fathers, these hardy scions of a noble race passed over the mountains, pre-empted the rich valley of the Tennessee, and established there a New Virginia. Twelve miles north of the Tennessee River, in the upper reaches of a rich agricultural section, where the spurs of the Appalachian range begin to hem it in from the north, at the base of a picturesque limestone cliff, there gushes from the earth a spring of crystal water. It is of such volume and force that it sets in motion the powerful machinery which carries unlimited luxury into every home. Upon the summit of the bluff which overlooks this marvelous spring and the far-reaching valley through which the silvery stream flows toward the great river, one of those restless pioneers, John Hunt by name, built his cabin of cedar logs in 1806 and claimed the region roundabout. There was no Alabama then-only Indians and wilderness. The area which now forms the states of Alabama and Mississippi was ceded in 1802 by Georgia to the United States. The fact that the Cherokee Indians had lived there from time beyond the memory of man and still claimed the land did not matter to John Hunt. He was friendly with the aborigines, and sent his Calebs and Joshuas back to civilization to spread the news of the rich Canaan, and others just as hardy and just as hungry for land joined him. The discreet Cherokees, children of the great Sequoyah, wisest of all the Indian tribes, realizing that the better part of valor was discretion, and seeing that the white man was surely crowding him out, ceded in 1819, for a price, all their claims north of the Tennessee River, and in the same year Congress made of Alabama a sovereign state. Huntsville had not waited for this. Indians or no Indians, it was a town already, having incorporated itself in 1811; and in 1812, the year that our second war began with England, when Napoleon's Grand Army was freezing to death in Russia, and one year before the great Tecumseh passed along the Creek Path in sight of these settlers' log defenses and made those speeches which stirred the red men to the massacre of Fort Mims and to other bloody deeds, Huntsville was publishing The Madison Gazette, the first newspaper printed within the limits of the present state. The first sessions of the legislature were held here, and but for its location in the extreme northern end of the state it would without doubt have been the permanent capital. It remained, however, the political capital and the social and commercial center of one of the most enterprising and productive agricultural communities in the New World. For more than a hundred miles in all directions the rich owners of vast estates whose work was done by slaves, and the humbler settlers who came in covered wagons and cleared their small farms and tilled them with their own hands, everybody, except the outlaws and the rowdies, who haunted the wilderness for refuge, made of Huntsville even in these earlier days the Mecca toward which all eyes were turned. The wealthier people built their homes and churches here, established in 1812 the famous Greene Academy, a college-preparatory school, whence to La Grange College, or Henry and Emory, or William and Mary, or the University of Virginia, or Princeton, or elsewhere in the then far-away world their sons went for their finishing studies. The Huntsville Seminary (Presbyterian), where my mother and her daughters were educated, and the equally famous and popular Female College (Methodist), were other institutions of learning which won for this beautiful city the welldeserved name of the "Athens of the South." The country was so new, the atmosphere and environment so inspiring to endeavor, that, instead of yielding to the softening influences of wealth and the luxury which the institution of slavery implied, the men of this period turned their attention to |