AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING ON THE STREET, IN WHICH TWO GREAT MEN ARE RECOGNIZED AS THE TYPES OF TWO CLASHING THEORIES—TOOMBS’S SUCCESSES—BROWN’S JUDGMENT. THE other day I saw two men meet on the street, bow cordially, and pass. I was struck by the contrast between them—by the difference in their walk, appearance and manner. This suggested that the contrast in their lives, in their lineage and their methods, was even greater than their physical make-up. And then, forgetting for the moment that a gubernatorial campaign of great fierceness was raging, I fell to wondering if there had ever been two masterful men whose paths lay near each other, and whose performance was so nearly equal, who had been born in such dissimilar conditions, and moved by such dissimilar motives. Joe Brown and Bob Toombs! Both illustrious and great—both powerful and strong—and yet at every point, and from every view, the perfect opposites of each other. Through two centuries have two strains of blood, two conflicting lines of thought, two separate theories of social, religious and political life, been working out the two types of men, which have in our day flowered into the perfection of contrast—vivid, thorough pervasive. For seven generations the ancestors of Joe Brown have been aggressive rebels; for a longer time the Toombs have been dauntless and intolerant followers of the king and kingliness. At the siege of Londonderry—the most remarkable fasting match beyond Tanner—Margaret and James Brown, grandparents of the James Brown who came to America and was grandparent of Joe Brown, were within the walls starving and fighting for William and Mary; and I have no doubt there were hard-riding Toombs outside the walls charging in the name of the peevish and unhappy James. Certain it is that forty years before, the direct ancestors of General Toombs on the Toombs estate were hiding good King Charles in the oak at Boscabel, where, I have no doubt, the father and uncles of the Londonderry Brown, with cropped hair and severe mien, were proguing about the place with their pikes, searching every bush, in the name of Cromwell and the psalm-singers. From these initial points sprang the two strains of blood—the one affluent, impetuous, prodigal, the other slow, resolute, forceful. From these ancestors came the two men—the one superb, ruddy, fashioned with incomparable grace and fulness; the other pale, thoughtful, angular, stripped down to bone and sinew. From these opposing theories came the two types—the one patrician, imperious, swift in action and brooking no stay; the other democratic, sagacious, jealous of rights and submitting to no imposition. The one for the king; the other for the people. It does not matter that the elder Toombs was a rebel in Virginia against the fat George, for that revolt was kingly of itself, and the Virginian cavaliers went into it with love-locks flying and care cast to the winds, feeling little of the patient spirit of