The Saturday Evening Post, in its issue of March 17th, says this of Senator Pettus: “It isn’t much of a trick to be eighty-five years young, but to be a vigorous and virile senator at eighty-five is an accomplishment. Few men have done that. Edmund Winston Pettus, of Alabama is one. One is reminded of a buffalo when Pettus comes into the Senate chamber. He has shoulders a yard across and a barrel of a chest upholding a short, thick neck and a massive head. When he walks he holds his head forward and shakes it slowly from side to side. It is fascinating to watch the sturdy old man and speculate how strong he was when he was young. He left Selma with a party of neighbors at the beginning of the gold excitement and rode horseback to California. He carried a Bible and a copy of Shakespeare in his saddle-bags and read them while on horseback and by the light of the camp fires at night. The Senator asserts that no better library has been taken there since. Pettus was a lieutenant in the Mexican War and a brigadier-general in the Confederate Army in the Civil War. There is a big, sprawling painting of the battle of Chepultepec over one of the stairways in the Senate wing of the Capitol. A few days ago a man was studying the picture. Senator Pettus came along. [Illustration: Edmund Winston Pettus.] “Sir,” said the man, “I observe that you are an old man. Will you kindly tell me if the people of those days wore clothes like those in the picture there?” “No, sir,” thundered Pettus, “they did not! I was in that battle, and I saw no such clothes as those. So far as that raiment is concerned that representation is a mere pictorial lie!” It is remarkable that from one section of Alabama—the Black Belt—and from one town in it—Selma—should have come two such men as Pettus and Morgan, both now octogenarians, and the same intellectual giants they were a half century ago. In a near issue of Trotwood’s, perhaps in the next number, will be told the story of that section—a section rich not only in sturdy, progressive people, but in a soil and climate of such great natural advantages that the mere telling of it will be a revelation to those who have not heard of it before.