hear if he could say anything to get out of the trap in which they had so cleverly caught him; and they became still. "It seems to me," he commenced, "that men like you meditating a great revolution ought first to learn good manners." At this condign rebuke of behavior which, according to stump usage, was as uncivil and impolite as if it had been shown Toombs in his own house by guests accepting his hospitality, spontaneous cheers from the union men, who were in very large majority, appeared to raise the roof. In his highest and readiest style--for mob opposition always lifted him at once into that--he reminded his hearers that their whole duty was to decide whether they would approve the compromise and the Georgia Platform or not; and that to discuss whether what he had spoken last year before these measures were even thought of, was right or wrong, was to substitute for a transcendently important public question a little personal one of no concern to them whatever. "If there is anything in my Hamilcar speech that cannot be reconciled with the measures which I have supported here to-day with reasons which my opponent confesses by his silence he cannot answer, I repudiate it. If the gentleman takes up my abandoned errors, let him defend them." How the union men cheered as he broke out of the trap, and caught the setters in it! I heard much of this day, still famous in all the locality, when six years afterwards I settled in Lexington, to begin law practice. Over and over again the Union men told how their spirits fell, fell, fell as the southern rights speaker kept on, until it looked black and dark around; and then how the sun broke out in full splendor at the first sentence of Toombs's reply, and the brightness mounted steadily to the end. That sentence last quoted is a proverb in that region yet. If in a dispute with anybody there you try to put him down by quoting his former contradictory utterances, he tells you that if you take up his abandoned errors you must defend them.