He held the paper in his hand while speaking, and referred to it twice in the exordium. Warming to his work, he waved it aloft in his impassioned gesticulation, evidently forgetful of it and what was written on it. At last, it escaped from his fingers and fluttered down to Mr. Michaux’s feet. The crowd, engrossed in the fervid oratory, did not notice what had happened. The student put his foot upon the bit of paper, without change of place or position. “It flashed across my mind that I would secure it when the speech was over, and keep it as a souvenir,” he said. “The next moment I forgot it, and everything else except what the man before me was saying. It was a Vesuvian tide of eloquence, and carried thought, feeling, imagination along with it. One hears nothing like it in these degenerate days. I did not recollect the paper until I was a mile away from the Court House, and the orator’s voice began to die out of my ears.” What a souvenir that would have been! I do not know that this anecdote has ever been published before. I had it, as I have said, directly from Mr. Michaux’s lips, and vouch for the authenticity. Many of the stories that clung to the Parsonage had to do with the Orator of Roanoke. The house was at one time the home of Captain “Jack” Marshall, the father of the late Judge Hunter Marshall. The latter was, during our residence in Charlotte, a near neighbor and charming acquaintance. His father, “Captain Jack,” was one of the cronies whom John Randolph’s eccentricities and fits of violent rage had not estranged. Politically, his constituents adored Randolph. Personally, they found him intolerable. Mrs. Eggleston, of whom I shall have more to say by-and-by, told me of visiting a playfellow in the Marshall home while John Randolph was staying with Captain Marshall. The two little girls were busy with their dolls in the lower hall, when a hand-bell was rung furiously above stairs. Little Lucy looked wonderingly at her companion. “Who is that? And what does it mean?” “Oh, it’s Mr. Randolph trying to frighten away the devil. He has just got up, you see, and he says the devil creeps from under his bed as soon as he wakes up.” The ringing continued at intervals for some minutes, and Lucy, terrified by the fancy that the fleeing demon might appear on the stairs, ran off home with the tale. “My mother had heard it often, before,” said my friend, laughing at my horrified incredulity. “It was but one of his crazy antics. No-o-o!” doubtfully, as I put a question. “I _don’t_ believe it was delirium tremens. He took opium at times. I don’t know that he drank heavily. Everybody took his toddy in those days, you know. John Randolph was _queer_, through and through, from the cradle to the grave, and like no other man that ever lived! We children were terribly afraid of him.”