re was in his kindly humor and geniality a charm which drew forth
from all he met just the qualities necessary to fill in his world with
the characters he desired. A wide and deep sympathy enabled him to
make that world so real and true that his readers entered it at once
and found therein such entertaining companionship that they were fain
to abide there ever after.

In 1835, when a boy fresh from Parley's History of America, the future
humorist made a journey from Cumberland County to Lynchburg, hearing
by the way alarming sounds which the initiated recognized as the
report of the blasting of rocks on the "Jeems and Kanawha Canell." To
the boy, with second-hand memories of Washington and his men tramping
confusedly about his mind, the noises signified a cannonade and he
waited in terrified excitement for the British bullet that was to put
him beyond the conflicts of the world, trying to postpone the evil
moment by hiding between two large men who were fellow-passengers with
him. This was in the days when the celebrated "Canell" was a subject
for the imagination to contemplate as a triumph of futurity and an
object for hope to feed upon--a period in which the traveller embarked
upon a fascinating batteau and spent a week of dreamy beauty in
sailing from Lynchburg to Richmond and ten days back to the hill city.
Time was not money in those days, it was vision and peace and color
and sunshine and all wherein the soul of man delighteth itself and
reveleth in the joy of living. The stream of imagination was no more
dammed than the river in which "shad used to run to Lynchburg,"
showing a highly developed aesthetic taste on the part of the shad. The
youthful traveller went to the Eagle Hotel and took a view of Main
Street and dared not even wonder if he should ever be big enough to
live in Richmond. Rapt soul of youth's dawn, with myriad dreams all to
vanish when the sun rises upon the morning!

On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great
Canal was completed and, while his early impression of the
unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his
visions of journeying by canal were yet to be realized. At the foot of
Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, passed under Seventh
Street bridge, and with the other passengers lingered on deck to see
Richmond slowly disappear in the distance. That night the doleful
packet-horn, contrasted with his memory of the cheerful, musical no