great effect upon him, it would seem; but it is impossible to estimate
these first influences, to decide the depth of the impression which
the child's heart is capable of receiving. The bright eyes of young
Robert Lee must have seen much around him to interest him and shape
his first views. Critics charged him with family pride sometimes;
if he possessed that virtue or failing, the fact was not strange.
Stratford opened before his childish eyes a memorial of the old
splendor of the Lees. He saw around him old portraits, old plate, and
old furniture, telling plainly of the ancient origin and high position
of his family. Old parchments contained histories of the deeds of his
race; old genealogical trees traced their line far back into the past;
old servants, grown gray in the house, waited upon the child; and, in
a corner of one of the great apartments, an old soldier, gray, too,
and shattered in health, once the friend of Washington and Greene, was
writing the history of the battles in which he had drawn his sword for
his native land.

Amid these scenes and surroundings passed the first years of Robert
E. Lee. They must have made their impression upon his character at
a period when the mind takes every new influence, and grows in
accordance with it; and, to the last, the man remained simple, hearty,
proud, courteous--the _country Virginian_ in all the texture of his
character. He always rejoiced to visit the country; loved horses; was
an excellent rider; was fond of plain country talk, jests, humorous
anecdote, and chit-chat--was the plain country gentleman, in a word,
preferring grass and trees and streams to all the cities and crowds in
the world. In the last year of his life he said to a lady: "My visits
to Florida and the White Sulphur have not benefited me much; but it
did me good to go to the White House, and see _the mules walking
round, and the corn growing_."