A marvellous memory and a more marvellous facile tongue and quick wit had the distinguished leader of freedom-lovers! There lived in Richmond, until the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, a stately gentlewoman of the very old school whom we, of two younger generations, regarded with prideful veneration, and with reason. For Lafayette, who had seen her dance at the aforesaid ball, had pronounced her, audibly, “the handsomest woman he had seen in America.” Time had handled her disrespectfully by the time I heard the tale. But I never questioned the truth of it until I found in three other cities as many antique belles upon whom he had set a seal of the self-same pattern. We were generously fed with authentic stories of Revolutionary days in my far-off childhood. I have sat at Major Morton’s feet and learned of the veteran much that nobody else wots of in our rushing times. I recall his emphatic denial of the assertion made by a Fourth-of-July orator to the effect that so grievous was the weight of public cares upon the Commander-in-Chief, he was never seen to smile during those eventful eight years of struggle and suspense. “Not a word of truth in it, sir!” Thus old Solid Column to the man who reported the speech to him. “I was with him at Valley Forge, sir, and nobody there tried harder to keep up the spirits of the men. I recollect, particularly, one bitter cold day, when a dozen or so of the officers were amusing themselves and trying to get warm by jumping up and down, leaping high up in the air and trying to clap their heels together twice before they struck the ground in coming down. General Greene was sure he could do it, but he was fleshy and never light on his feet, besides being naturally sober. He was a Quaker, you know, and was turned out of meeting for joining the army. Well, on this particular day he took his turn with the others in jumping. And a poor hand he was at it! He couldn’t clap his heels together once on the way down, let alone twice. By-and-by he made a tremendous effort and pitched over, head down and heels up—flat on the snow. General Washington was watching them from where he stood in his tent door, and when General Greene went down—how the General laughed! He fairly held his sides! “‘Ah, Greene!’ he called out. ‘You were always a lubberly fellow!’ “I am not saying he wasn’t one of the gravest men I ever saw, as a rule, but he often smiled, and he did laugh sometimes.” My grandfather’s uncle and godfather, Sterling Smith, was one of our family Revolutionary heroes. My mother, who had a fair talent for mimicry, had an anecdote of the old war-horse’s defence of Washington against the oft-repeated charge of profanity upon the field of Monmouth: