Blair was a man not only of strong ambition but of arbitrary temperament. He could not tolerate the idea of a newcomer pre-empting what he had considered his premises. If he could not rule he was ready to ruin. That disposition accorded with both his mental and physical make-up. Bodily he was a bundle of bones and nerves without a particle of surplus flesh. His hair was red, his complexion was sandy, and his eyes, when he was excited and angry, had a baleful expression that led some one in my presence on a certain occasion to speak of them as "brush-heaps afire." He was not an eloquent man, although a ready and frequent public speaker. His voice was not musical. His strong forte was invective. He was nearly always denouncing somebody. Apparently, he was never so happy as when making another miserable. Sometimes his personal allusions were very broad. He was accustomed in his speeches to refer to one of Missouri's United States Senators as "that lop-eared vulgarian." That he was not almost all the time in personal difficulties was due to the fact that he was known to be a man of exceptional courage. He was a born fighter. Physically I think he was the bravest man I ever knew. I witnessed several manifestations of his fearlessness, but one particularly impressed me. I have spoken of the Camp Jackson affair. Although the people in the Rebel encampment surrendered without a blow, the incident was attended with considerable bloodshed. A mob of Rebel sympathizers, consisting largely of half-grown boys--I was in the midst of the throng at the time--with their pistols opened fire on a German Union regiment and killed several of its men. The troops, in return, poured a volley into the crowd of spectators from which the shots had come, killing or wounding over forty persons, the most of them, as is usual in such cases, being inoffensive onlookers. A man standing beside me and, like myself, a spectator, had the top of one ear clipped off by a Minié ball as cleanly as if it had been done with a knife. I found when, soon afterwards, I reached the business center of the city, where the Rebel element then largely predominated, that the story of the tragedy had swelled the number of the victims to one thousand. Intense excitement and the most furious indignation prevailed. Hundreds of men, with flaming faces, were swearing the most dreadful oaths that they would shoot Frank Blair, whom they seemed to regard as wholly responsible, on sight. Many of them were flourishing pistols in confirmation of their bloody purpose. Just then the attention of the crowd was drawn to an unusual spectacle. Down Fourth Street, which was then the leading business avenue of St. Louis, and at that time densely packed with the excited people, came the Union soldiers with the prisoners from Camp Jackson on their way to the United States Arsenal grounds. At the head of the procession marched the men of the First Missouri volunteer regiment, their guns "aport" and ready for