preparatory to decamping from Charlotte between two days, Duncan determined to throw himself upon the generosity of his former friend John, and so under cover of the darkness he rode out to his farm-house nine miles in the country. John, who was two miles off in the patriot camp, was sent for. Duncan surrendered his sword and begged his old friend to forgive bygones and advise him what to do. John’s sympathy for him at that stage of affairs was not particularly tender as may be supposed, but nevertheless his advice was no doubt the best possible. He said: “Ocheltree, neither your life nor your property is safe in Mechlenburg. The Whigs will take both. Your only safety is in instant flight. I advise you to reach the Yadkin before daylight.” He took the advice. And so they parted. Four generations later like two stray straws on a flood, Allan Ocheltree and I were floated into the same class room at school. Did it make any difference to me or to him that his great grandfather, made a bad guess seventy years before? Not a bit. Every man’s ancestral tree is just the same height as all the rest, his lineage is just as long and his pedigree must contain practically the same number of terms whether we reckon back to Adam or to the Ascidian or to original protoplasm. Not a member of the long line made himself or the circumstances surrounding him, and in no two cases were these precisely the same. The circumstances that made Confucius or Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, or Columbus, or Washington never happened to anybody else. It was no fault of the obscure ancestors or descendants or cousins near and remote of those worthies that these circumstances never surrounded _them_. On the other hand it cannot be ascribed to the merit of the long line of those belonging to the dead level of the average, in size and in quality, that they have been missed by the untoward circumstances that selected certain individuals to be in one respect or another conspicuously below that dead level.