On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went
South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a
lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.

Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wandering
aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in a
famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seated
beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now you
see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time."

Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.

"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."

Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the
obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and
general prosperity. She would none of this.

[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]

"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has come
to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."

She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave
her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to
her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and
easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then
life tenure a la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha
Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongs