Lincoln was under the roof of Chatham, and whether
Lincoln knew, when he slept in "my" room, that Washington and Lee had
both been there before him.

War, I thought, not only makes strange bedfellows, but strange
combinations in the histories of bedrooms.

Then the maid rapped for the second time upon my door, and though this
time I got up at once, my ruminations made me scandalously late for
breakfast.

After breakfast came the motor, which was to take us to the
battlefields, its driver a thin dry-looking, dry-talking man, with the
air of one a little tired of the story he told to tourists day in and
day out, yet conscientiously resolved to go through with it. Before the
huge cemetery which overlooks the site of the most violent fighting that
occurred in the bloody and useless Battle of Fredericksburg, he paused
briefly; then drove us to the field of Chancellorsville, to that of the
Battles of the Wilderness, and finally to the region of Spottsylvania
Courthouse; and at each important spot he stopped and told us what had
happened there. He knew all about the Civil War, that man, and he had a
way of passing out his information with a calm assumption that his
hearers knew nothing about it whatever. This irritated my companion, who
also knows all about the War, having once passed three days in the
neighborhood of a Soldiers' Home. Consequently he kept cutting in,
supplying additional details--such, for instance, as that Stonewall
Jackson, who died in a house which the driver pointed out, was shot by
some of his own men, who took him for a Yankee as he was returning from
a reconnaissance.

Either one of these competitive historians alone, I could have stood,
but the way they picked each other up, fighting the old-time battles
over again, got on my nerves. Besides, it was cold, and as I have taken
occasion to remark before, I do not like cold motor rides. Indeed, as I
think it over, it seems to me I do not like battlefields, either. At all
events, I became more and more morose as we traversed that bleak
Virginia landscape, and I am afraid that before the day was over I was
downright sulky.

As we drove back to Fredericksburg and to the train which was to take us
to Charlottesville, my companion made remarks of a general character
about people who were trivial minded, and who didn't take a proper
interest in the scenes of great historical occurrences. When he had
continued for some time in this vein, I remarked feebly