This is the story of "the crazy man of Valley Street." During the Civil War, Captain Chandler was in command of a United States vessel cruising in the Chesapeake Bay searching ships carrying contraband. He was accused of making a traitorous remark and dismissed from the service. His family was living at the Union Hotel, but they left and went to New York to live. He took his savings and built for himself the little house on Valley Street. Its interior was made to resemble exactly the cabin of a ship. My friend told me that his first encounter with the old gentleman was one Monday morning about nine-thirty when, having been changed to this new route, he stopped to open the gate to deliver a letter. It was locked. He knocked. At last a window was thrown up and the old man's head emerged. He said the captain looked very much like the pictures of General Robert E. Lee. Seeing it was the postman with a letter, he said he would open the gate, so he pulled a rope--and presto! open it flew. He said he never opened it until ten o'clock in the morning and wanted to know if his mail could be delivered after that, which the carrier obligingly offered to do, by changing his route somewhat. After that, for years, Mr. Postman was a friend to the old man, though he never really entered the house. Each month a check for twenty dollars would come from a nephew in Chicago, which the postman would take to Mr. Berry with a note from the captain, asking to have it cashed, and specifying the number of dollar bills, fifty-cent pieces, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. A little colored boy who lived nearby was commissioned occasionally to purchase necessary food, but the old man himself never went out except after dark. Finally, one day when the little boy came to do the errands, he could get no answer to his knock, so he got a man to lift him up where he could peer over the high board fence at the side and look into an open window. Through it he saw the old gentleman, sprawled out in a big chair, immovable. They broke into the house and found that he was paralyzed. He could not speak, but shook his head when they said they wanted to call help from the police. He was laid on a mattress on the floor, and before long, all his troubles were over. His nephew came from Chicago, bought a lot in Rock Creek Cemetery and had the old gentleman decently buried. But not long after, his son in New York, reading of it in the paper, came down and had his father reinterred in the family lot in Oak Hill. So, in death, the old gentleman was accorded the honor of two funerals. [Illustration: _Courtesy Frick Art Reference Library_. WASHINGTON BOWIE] Chapter XIV _Stoddert (Q) Street_