Now I am moved to remember, and I might add almost to regret these things, because I would like much at this pinch to color for you a right picture of the fair, innocent, unfortunate Peg O'Neal. Yet how am I to do this?--I, loaded of a sluggish fancy and a genius without touch! I am no Apelles to paint an Aphrodite, no Phidias to carve a Venus; and for that matter, Peg no Phryne to be model for such art. The best I might draw would stand crude and cornerwise, since I own only to talents whereof the graphic character is exhausted when they have laid out a worm fence? It is within the rim of the possible that you may feel for me, born as I show you with the hands of all good power of description bound close and fast by my sides. Perhaps, too, you yourself on occasion have been stung of high impulse and fain would soar with a poem; and then, when you stretched for flight, found no furnishment of wings. Most folk have been thus crowded upon by exaltations, and were prey to thoughts for the expression of which their lisping natures lacked facility. They had the sinew but not the soul. There was verse in them, but with it no presentation dress of word or ornament of rhyme. They caged a tune of music in their hearts and failed of those notes asked for to announce its melody. Still, our Peg, for whom we toiled--the General and I--and intrigued and made new friendships and broke old ones, and who was in her fortunes the beginning of policies on the General's part so lasting in importance to the State, shall not go untold. I must make what effort lies in me to give some notion of a beauty that claimed so much of potency in equations of government solved of our times. For myself, and I take no shame for it, I say freely that of the charges laid against her by common tongue, I was convinced of her innocence by the mere beauty of her face, just as the loveliness of that Greek girl aforetime convinced the judges and wrought a verdict in her favor. There be flowers so purely beautiful as to refuse and refute a stain; and such a blossom was the lustrous Peg O'Neal. I was first to meet with her at this time; and while I had not condemned her in my thoughts--to condemn a woman is, for a man, the coward part!--if I found myself possessed of views at all, they leaned to her disfavor. I knew the General regarded Peg as a white soul suffering wrong; but I also knew the General to be mercurial, and a blindly passionate recruit when once enlisted. Besides, his own wife had been throughout her life--and she most virtuous!--so lashed of slander, that his blood was ever up and about the defence of any whose wailing wrongs resembled her's. The General's attitudes were never the offshoots of cold wisdom; he was one who believed the worst of a foe so soon as it was told, and the best of a friend before ever it was told at all. Wherefore I would not accept the General's decision touching Peg, more than I would take other conclusions from his hands.