ensue, it was the hereditary custom of certain families more especially
of South Carolina and of Louisiana,--but of South Carolina in
particular--to send their youth to Harvard, there to receive a college
education. It thus chanced that among my associates at Harvard were not
a few who bore names long familiarly and honorably known to Carolinian
records,--Barnwell and Preston, Rhett and Alston, Parkman and Eliot; and
among these were some I knew well, and even intimately. Gone now with
the generation and even the civilization to which they belonged, I doubt
if any of them survive. Indeed only recently I chanced on a grimly
suggestive mention of one who had left on me the memory of a character
and personality singularly pure, high-toned and manly,--permeated with a
sense of moral and personal obligation. I have always understood he died
five years later at Sharpsburg, as you call it, or Antietam, as it was
named by us, in face-to-face conflict with a Massachusetts regiment
largely officered by Harvard men of his time and even class,--his own
familiar friends. This is the record, the reference being to a marriage
service held at St. Paul's church in Richmond, in the late autumn of
1862: "An indefinable feeling of gloom was thrown over a most auspicious
event when the bride's youngest sister glided through a side door just
before the processional. Tottering to a chancel pew, she threw herself
upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs. Scarcely a year
before, the wedding march had been played for her, and a joyous throng
saw her wedded to gallant Breck Parkman. Before another twelvemonth
rolled around the groom was killed at the front."[2] Samuel Breck
Parkman was in the Harvard class following that to which I belonged.
Graduating in 1857, fifty-five years later I next saw his name in the
connection just given. It recorded an incident of not infrequent
occurrence in those dark and cruel days.

It was, however, in Breck Parkman and his like that I first became