her in rank and title. The two
who were left to sit on the much wider expanse of sofa on the other side
of father were outsiders for the time being.

My aunt Anna, my mother's sister, lived with us. She was as devoted to
us children as was my mother herself, and we were equally devoted to her
in return. She taught us our lessons while we were little. She and
my mother used to entertain us by the hour with tales of life on
the Georgia plantations; of hunting fox, deer, and wildcat; of the
long-tailed driving horses, Boone and Crockett, and of the riding
horses, one of which was named Buena Vista in a fit of patriotic
exaltation during the Mexican War; and of the queer goings-on in the
Negro quarters. She knew all the "Br'er Rabbit" stories, and I was
brought up on them. One of my uncles, Robert Roosevelt, was much struck
with them, and took them down from her dictation, publishing them in
_Harper's_, where they fell flat. This was a good many years before a
genius arose who in "Uncle Remus" made the stories immortal.

My mother's two brothers, James Dunwoodie Bulloch and Irvine Bulloch,
came to visit us shortly after the close of the war. Both came under
assumed names, as they were among the Confederates who were at that time
exempted from the amnesty. "Uncle Jimmy" Bulloch was a dear old retired
sea-captain, utterly unable to "get on" in the worldly sense of that
phrase, as valiant and simple and upright a soul as ever lived, a
veritable Colonel Newcome. He was an Admiral in the Confederate navy,
and was the builder of the famous Confederate war vessel Alabama. My
uncle Irvine Bulloch was a midshipman on the _Alabama_, and fired
the last gun discharged from her batteries in the fight with the
_Kearsarge_. Both of these uncles lived in Liverpool after the war.

My uncle Jimmy Bulloch was forgiving and just in reference to the
Union forces, and could discuss all phases of the Civil War with entire
fairness and generosity. But in English politics he promptly became a
Tory of the most ultra-conservative school. Lincoln and Grant he could
admire, but he would not listen to anything in favor of Mr. Gladstone.
The only occasions on which I ever shook his faith in me were when I
would venture meekly to suggest that some of the manifestly preposterous
falsehoods about Mr. Gladstone could not be true. My uncle was one of
the best men I have ever known, and when I have sometimes been tempted
to wonder how good people can believe