To give credit where credit is due, the General kept himself quite steady under this unexpected fire, and refilled his pipe in confident, unshaken peace. “My explosive friend,” said the General, “I need make no better answer than just to turn your question on yourself. You know full well you would no more leave me than I would leave you. Those growls you give us arise from a dyspepsia of the imagination. You'll be as right as gold after a night's sleep.” It was upon me a bit later, as I sat trying to do some letters, that one secret of my gloom reposed in Peg's great chair, spreading its empty arms to my eyes each time I raised them from the page. It was that mocking empty chair to stare my heart out of countenance and give accent to its dreary emptiness. On the impulse, I swooped as on an enemy and bore it to another room. Then I felt better; and indeed it was a relief not to be longer taunted of that chair, which would exult in being vacant and find a triumph by flinging at me the absence of my Peg. Now the General, while commonly as frank for talk as a cataract, could be, when he preferred, as inscrutable as the tomb. It pleased him to lock up his tongue over Nullification; and while I understood his pose, and both Peg and Noah had heard him tell his thought on that pregnant topic of state, together with his feeling for Calhoun, folk for a widest part remained much in the dark. And it was often put and never answered, this query of what the General's course would be when the last grapple came to hand. The agitators for Secession were no folk to put to sea wanting chart, however crude, to display the shores and waters about them. They resolved to arrive by some knowledge of the General's temper on this dogma of danger so near the Calhoun heart. In quest of such news, a spy, or perhaps he should be called a scout--the title is the more honorable--was dispatched to find and mark the General's position. The General and I were given a foreword by Noah of our gentleman who would be thus upon a recon-noiter. He came in sight one day, and fell upon our flank in this fashion. It was an afternoon, crisp and clear; altogether a day proper for middle autumn rather than the winter of any honest year. I had been out with Noah and was about my return. As I came up the walk, the General's ramrod form--tall hat, dark garb, swinging his tasseled walking-stick--emerged from the mansion's front door. “Turn with me for a short jaunt,” said he. “But first step down to the stables. I must have a look to my horses. That clumsy rascal, Charlie, let them run away, and aside from a strain to the horses and a hand's breadth of hide knocked off the nigh one's shoulder, he broke the wheel of the coach--my wife's coach, Major; I wouldn't have had it injured for a world of coaches.” This coach was one of the General's treasures. Well I recall how it was first brought up the Cumberland years before and rolled ashore at Nashville.