man was a match for six Northern men.

On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went
South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in
a lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.

Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time
wandering aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding
winter in a famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose
garden, and seated beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air
of triumph, "Now you see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you
were wrong all the time."

Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.

"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."

Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the
obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and
general prosperity. She would none of this.

[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]

"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has
come to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."

She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I
gave her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give
emphasis to her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her
so simple and easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third
term, and then life tenure a la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt,
the son of Martha Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to
redress all the wrongs of the South and bring the Yankees to their just
deserts at last.

"If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why
not out of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"

Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to
the national capital, and the next day was called by the President to
the White House.

"The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is whether that old woman was
a real person or a figment of your imagination?"

"She was a figment of my imagination," I answered, "but you put her out
of business with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement
a bit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead."

He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson," he said, "I want to
talk to you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny
that I have thought of the thing--thou