ect line than the old
wagon road ran.
Mr. Jefferson was the father of the University of Virginia, one of the
most historic piles I have ever clapped eyes on. It is now under the
management of a classical janitor, who has a tinge of negro blood in his
veins, mixed with the rich Castilian blood of somebody else.
He has been at the head of the University of Virginia for over forty
years, bringing in the coals and exercising a general oversight over the
curriculum and other furniture. He is a modest man, with a tendency
toward the classical in his researches. He took us up on the roof,
showed us the outlying country, and jarred our ear-drums with the big
bell. Mr. Estes, who has general charge of Monticello--called
Montechello--said that Mr. Jefferson used to sit on his front porch with
a powerful glass, and watch the progress of the work on the University,
and if the workmen undertook to smuggle in a soft brick, Mr. Jefferson,
five or six miles away, detected it, and bounding lightly into his
saddle, he rode down there to Charlottesville, and clubbed the
bricklayers until they were glad to pull down the wall to that brick and
take it out again.
This story is what made me speak of that section a few minutes ago as an
outlying country.
The other day Charles L. Seigel told us the Confederate version of an
attack on Fort Moultrie during the early days of the war, which has
never been printed. Mr. Seigel was a German Confederate, and early in
the fight was quartered, in company with others, at the Moultrie House,
a seaside hotel, the guests having deserted the building.
Although large soft beds with curled hair mattresses were in each room,
the department issued ticks or sacks to be filled with straw for the use
of the soldiers, so that they would not forget that war was a serious
matter. Nobody used them, but they were there all the same.
Attached to the Moultrie House, and wandering about the back-yard, there
was a small orphan jackass, a sorrowful little light blue mammal, with a
tinge of bitter melancholy in his voice. He used to dwell on the past a
good deal, and at night he would refer to it in tones that were choked
with emotion.
The boys caught him one evening as the gloaming began to arrange itself,
and threw him down on the green grass. They next pulled a straw bed over
his head, and inserted him in it completely, cutting holes for his
legs. Then they tied a string of sleighbells to his tail, and hit hi
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