This is the night of the impersonations and they are over. It was one of the greatest triumphs ever experienced at the Byrd Academy. It will probably be mentioned in the future with the same praise as the Colonel's valedictory that left not a dry eye in the house, because they all knew that all the boys in the Senior Class of sixty-one would go to the war the next week. I choke up whenever I hear the Colonel tell of it, as I have many times in these last two months of my life in Byrdsville. Miss Prissy always cries copiously when he gets to the place where she gave him a flower when he had walked home with her--she only fourteen years old and in short dresses--and which he wore in battle in his pocket Bible. What would she do if she should lose the Colonel by sudden death before she has rewarded his affections by marrying him? She ought to think of that. Belle did beautifully, first on the program, dressed up in grown clothes and having a Byrdsville society conversation over an imaginary telephone. It sounded just like Helena, and I thought it was not very nice of her to impersonate her own sister, but it was a comfort to see how the Idol enjoyed it. If he liked Helena to any extent, he would have displayed indignation. Instead the corners of his mouth twitched for minutes afterward. I believe at some time Helena must have telephoned him. Mamie Sue did a delicious old lady telling about her grandson to the two Willises, who were company to tea, that made Hie audience shake with jollity. There was a perfectly darling trace of Miss Priscilla in the way she did it, that made the Colonel almost unable to keep his seat, and Miss Priscilla laughed out loud twice. The affection I bear Mamie Sue fattens in my heart at the same rate the object does in real life. "The way the two Willises impersonated their own silence was a triumph of art," the Idol said in my ear after it was over. It embarrassed me greatly to have him be obliged to crowd into a seat with Lovelace Peyton and me, but it was crowded everywhere else, too. If I had had my way he would have had the best seat in the house, comfortably alone. Sam Hayes was "Old Hickory," General Andrew Jackson, the night before the battle of New Orleans. Mr. Douglass Byrd wrote his piece and Judge Luttrell, who is the son of one of that famous Tennessee hero's best friends and staff-officers, was so affected he blew his nose feelingly. Pink would be a negro, so as for once to be rid--by the aid of burnt cork--of the disgrace of his unmasculine beauty, and he was so like Uncle Pompey that Lovelace Peyton insisted on calling out to him from the second seat until Pink had to tell him who he was before he could go on with his hen story, which was one of Uncle Pompey's own, and which was rib-aching funny.