“The balky horse they call John Tyler, we’ll head him soon or burst his boiler; His cursed ‘grippe’ has seized us all, which Doctor Clay will cure next fall. “The people’s fav’rite, Henry Clay, is now the ‘fashion’ of the day; And let the track be dry or mucky, we’ll stake our pile on Ole Kentucky. “Get out of the way, he’s swift and lucky; clear the track for Ole Kentucky!” (The chorus of each preceding verse is, “Get out of the way, you’re all unlucky,” etc. The “Fox” is Martin Van Buren, or “Matty.” The “Coon” is Clay. The “Wagon-Horse from Pennsylvany” is James Buchanan.) Another ballad, sung that day under the trees at the back of the Court House, began after this wise: “What has caused this great commotion Our ranks betray? It is the ball a-rolling on To clear the way For Harry Clay. And with him we’ll beat your Polk! Polk! Polk! And his motley crew of folk. O! with him we’ll beat your Polk.” To my excited imagination it was simple fact, not a flight of fancy, that Powhatan should be alluded to that day as “your historic county—a mere wave in the vast Union— “That ever shall be Divided as billows, yet one as the sea.” “A wave, fellow-citizens, that has caught the irresistible impulse of wind and tide bearing us on to the most glorious victory America has ever seen.” Ah’s me! That was how both parties talked and felt with regard to the Union seventeen years before the very name became odious to those who had been ready to die in defence of it. I cannot dismiss the subject of public functions in the “historic county” without devoting a few pages to the annual Muster Day. It was preceded by five days of “officers’ training.” The manœuvres of the latter body were carried on in the public square, and, as one end of our house overlooked this, no lessons were studied or recited between the hours of 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. on those days. The sophisticated twentieth-century youngling will smile contemptuously at hearing that, up to this time, I had never heard a brass-band. But I knew all about martial music. Already there was laid away in the fat portfolio nobody except myself ever opened, a story in ten parts, in which the hero’s voice was compared to “the thrilling strains of martial music.” I boiled the tale down four years thereafter, and it was printed. It had a career. But “that is another story.” I used to sit with my “white work,” or a bit of knitting, in hand, at that end window, looking across the side-street down upon the square, watching the backing and filling, the prancing and the halting of the eight “officers” drilled in military tactics by Colonel Hopkins, the strains of the drum and fife in my ears, and dream out war-stories by the dozen.