that more Southern soldiers died in Northern prisons than Northerners
in Southern prisons, giving figures in support of his statement. A
Northern officer in Richmond answered the article, questioning its
veracity. The doctor promptly sent a challenge to combat which the
officer declined, saying that he had fought hard enough for the
prisoners in war-time, he did not intend to fight for them now that
hostilities were over.

The second time that our genial humorist came near the serious reality
of a duel he was the party challenged. The cause of the
misunderstanding that promised to result so tragically was a magazine
article in which the doctor caricatured a peculiar kind of Virginia
Editor. The essay was a source of amusement to all its readers except
one editor, who imagined himself insulted. Urged on by misguided
friends, he challenged the author of the offending paper who,
notwithstanding his opposition to the code, accepted. A meeting was
arranged and the belligerents had arrived at historic Bladensburg with
blood-thirsty intent, when one of those sunny souls, possessed of a
universality of mind which rendered him a friend to all parties,
arrived on the scene and a disastrous outcome was averted.

Dr. Bagby has been called "a Virginia realist." To him, receiving his
first views of life from the foot of the Blue Ridge, one realism of
the external world was too beautiful to admit of his finding in the
ideal anything that could more nearly meet his fancy-picture of
loveliness than the scenes which opened daily before his eyes. Years
later a memory of his early home returns to him in the dawn:

Suddenly there came from thicket or copse of the distant forest,
I could not tell where, a "wood-note wild" of some bird I had not