ad been, and I regarded her as a woman
gifted with prophecy. Other coffins, too, were put off from time to
time. About the war there could no longer be a doubt. And, a little
later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift,
deep experiences.

"One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles away,
near the capital. The General and the Governor sat on horses and the
soldiers marched by them and the band played. They were going to the
front. There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night.
Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years
passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend whole
days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers. So precious became woollen
cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were unravelled to be
spun and woven into new fabrics. And they baked bread and roasted
chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to go to the soldiers at
the front[1]."

The quality that is uppermost in the Page stock, both in the past and in
the present generation, is that of the builder and the pioneer. The
ancestor of the North Carolina Pages was a Lewis Page, who, in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, left the original American home
in Virginia, and started life anew in what was then regarded as the less
civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to
the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising
tide of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England
relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely
be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new
things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which has never
forsaken his descendants. His son, Anderson Page, manifesting this same
love of change, went farther south into Wake County, and acquired a
plantation of a thousand acres about twelve miles north of Raleigh. He
cultivated this estate with slaves, sending his abundant crops of cotton
and tobacco to Petersburg, Virginia, a traffic that made him
sufficiently prosperous to give several of his sons a college education.
The son who is chiefly interesting at the present time, Allison Francis
Page, the father of the future Ambassador, did not enjoy this
opportunity. This fact in itself gives an insight into his character.
While his brothers were grappling with Latin and Greek and theology--one
of the