l he was the party challenged. The cause of the
misunderstanding that promised to result so tragically was a magazine
article in which the doctor caricatured a peculiar kind of Virginia
Editor. The essay was a source of amusement to all its readers except
one editor, who imagined himself insulted. Urged on by misguided
friends, he challenged the author of the offending paper who,
notwithstanding his opposition to the code, accepted. A meeting was
arranged and the belligerents had arrived at historic Bladensburg with
blood-thirsty intent, when one of those sunny souls, possessed of a
universality of mind which rendered him a friend to all parties,
arrived on the scene and a disastrous outcome was averted.

Dr. Bagby has been called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his
first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of
the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the
ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture of
loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years
later a memory of his early home returns to him in the dawn:

Suddenly there came from thicket or copse of the distant forest,
I could not tell where, a "wood-note wild" of some bird I had not
heard for half a century nearly, and in an instant the beauty,
the mystery, the holiness of nature came back to me just as it
came in childhood when sometimes my playmates left me alone in
the great orchard of my home in Cumberland.

He avows himself

--a pagan and a worshipper of Pan, loving the woods and waters,
and preferring to go to them (when my heart was stirred thereto
by that mysterious power which, as I conceive, cares little for
worship made stately and to order on certain recurring calendar
days) rather than to most of the brick and mortar pens that are
supposed to hold in some way that which the visible universe no
more contains than the works of his hands contain the sculptor
who makes them; for I take it that the glittering show revealed
by the mightiest telescope, or by the hope mightier even than the
imagination of the highest mind, is but as a parcel of motes
shining in a single thin beam of the great sun unseen and hidden
behind shutters never to be wide opened.

Our "Virginia Realist" needed not to call upon his imagination for
personalities with which to fill his free-hand sketches of nature, for
the