And yet, as may the Amazon have ultimate well-head in some rivulet as thin as a thread, or a spring so little that a gourd might serve for its exhaustion, so did the General come to select his place in this business of upholding the Union against those who would pull it down, as incident to bucklering a woman--poor and slight and feeble, she was; the beautiful Peg O'Neal!--who for her loveliness was envied and for her goodness was hated and for her origin as a tavern-keeper's daughter was contemned by those proud folk who named themselves the nation's court of fashion. The General was a sentimentalist; justice and to do right were with him instincts, and came not as grist ground coldly in the mills of calculated selfishness and reason. Scotch-Irish he was in his strain; but more Irish than the Irish and more Scotch than the Scotch, he in a manner wonderful could in the same moment be cool and warm, and cautious and headlong, and prudent and reckless, and close and frank--at once a Fabius and a Scipio. In a glow of sentiment made molten hot by the recent death of his wife--to him the Goddess of his worship--the General would extend the power of his place and name to be a refuge for the tearful, beautiful Peg, whom, as a child, his wife had known and loved, and whom he now found evilly crushed beneath the social wheel. And in a rush of feeling he rescues her and sets her high among the highest. Still, while it owns its hot inception to impulse wholly Irish, this rescue; the carrying out thereof, when now the General goes about it, turns to be all Scotch in the cautious yet indomitable character of its execution. Also, for that the General is ardent and prone to mix private passion with his public thought, he arrives at a hatred of nullification, finding it a prime principle among those enemies whom he faces for the sake of poor Peg O'Neal. It is the great fire kindled of a small thing, this, the General's war to sustain the Union against ones who already searched for its life. He rides into the lists for a woman's name, and all unknowingly he bears the country's future on the point of his spear. And so comes this story; to the purpose and the hope that what in this good way the General did, and why and how he did it, may not die and disappear upon the memories of men. PEGGY O'NEAL CHAPTER I--THE LUSTROUS PEG O'NEAL It was my fate, I will not say my misfortune--being too proud--to dwell overmuch with camps and caucuses and transact more than stood best for me of politics and war. These were my schools, and they sadly served to make me coarse and turn me hard. Sometimes I think this pity, for I was conceived, you are to notice, with no scanty promise of fineness to my fiber.