The poet-painter Buchanan Read, Herman Melville, and many minor writers made “Winchester” the subject of poems and sketches, while several sculptors and painters delineated him in marble and bronze and on canvas. On every returning Memorial day many gray-haired survivors of Sheridan’s rough-riders who remember the services of his Steed as black as the steeds of night, cross over from New York to Governor’s Island museum, and place flowers on the glass case containing the celebrated charger, whose body, after being set up by a skilled taxidermist, was, accompanied by his accoutrements, presented by the general to the United States Military Service Institution. Near the close of his career, when General Grant lost his fortune in Wall Street, he voluntarily surrendered all his property with a single exception. He retained Read’s spirited painting of Sheridan’s “Ride,” representing “Winchester” and his master, the greatest _sabreur_ that our country has produced, perhaps not surpassed by any cavalry commander since the days of Murat. Read’s poem of “Sheridan’s Ride” will probably outlive his famous picture. Hurrah, hurrah for Sheridan! Hurrah, hurrah for horse and man! And when their statues are placed on high Under the dome of the Union sky, The American soldier’s temple of fame, There with the glorious General’s name Be it said in letters both bold and bright: “Here is the steed that saved the day By carrying Sheridan into the fight, From Winchester--twenty miles away.” May I be permitted, in conclusion, to mention that none of the hundreds of battle-chargers ridden by Washington, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Sheridan, suffered mutilation by the barbarous modern practice of docking their tails, which even uncivilized savages never perpetrate on their horses. [Illustration] MRS. LONGBOW’S BIOGRAPHY BY GORDON HALL GEROULD My acquaintance with Mrs. Longbow was due to my early friendship with her son Charles. Mrs. Longbow and her two daughters swung into my orbit quite unimportantly at first as shadowy persons to whom Charlie wrote letters home while we were boys at school; later I came to know the mother as an imposing figure, shiny with black jet, who eyed the school from a platform on those great occasions when Charlie received prizes and I did not. I never learned her weight, but I saw that her displacement was enormous. By successive stages, as I increased in stature and in years, my knowledge of her grew. I visited her son, I danced with her daughters, I frequently conversed with her,--she preferred to converse rather than to talk,--and I came to know as much of her habit and attitude of mind, perhaps, as one could who was thirty years her junior, not actively engaged in reforming the world, and of the despised sex.