Charlottesville--"

From the portico came a voice. "I am sure that few in Botetourt need an
introduction here. We, no more than others, are free from vanity, and we
think we know a hero by intuition. Men of Botetourt, we have the honour
to listen to Major Fauquier Cary, who carried the flag up Chapultepec!"

Amid applause a man of perhaps forty years, spare, bronzed, and
soldierly, entered the clear space between the pillars, threw out his
arm with an authoritative gesture, and began to speak in an odd, dry,
attractive voice. "You are too good!" he said clearly. "I'm afraid you
don't know Fauquier Cary very well, after all. He's no hero--worse luck!
He's only a Virginian, trying to do the right as he sees it, out yonder
on the plains with the Apaches and the Comanches and the sage brush and
the desert--"

There was an interruption. "How about Chapultepec?"--"And the Rio
Grande?"--"Didn't we hear something about a fight in Texas?"

The speaker laughed. "A fight in Texas? Folk, folk, if you knew how many
fights there are in Texas--and how meritorious it is to keep out of
them! No; I'm only a Virginian out there." He regarded the throng with
his magnetic smile, his slight and fine air of gaiety in storm. "As you
know, I am by no means the only Virginian, and they are heroes, the
others, if you like!--real, old-line heroes, brave as the warriors in
Homer, and a long sight better men! I am happy to report to his kinsmen
here that General Joseph E. Johnston is in health--still loving
astronomy, still reading du Guesclin, still studying the Art of War.
He's a soldier's soldier, and that, in its way, is as fine a thing as a
poet's poet! I see men before me who are of the blood of the Lees. Out
there by the Rio Grande is a Colonel Robert E. Lee, of whom Virginia may
well be proud! There are few heights in those western deserts, but he
carries his height with him. He's marked for greatness. And there are
'Beauty' Stuart, and Dabney Maury, the best of fellows, and Edward
Dillon, and Walker and George Thomas, and many another good man and
true. First and last, there's a deal of old Virginia following Mars, out
yonder! We've got Hardee, too, from Georgia, and Van Dorn from
Mississippi, and Albert Sidney Johnston from Kentucky--no better men in
Homer, no better men! And there are others as soldierly--McClellan with
whom I graduated at West Point, Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Sedgwick,
Sykes, and Averell. McClellan and Hancock are f