conscious of certain phases of the South Carolina character which
subsequently I learned to bear in high respect.

So far as this University of South Carolina was concerned, it also so
chanced that, by the merest accident, I, a very young man, was thrown
into close personal relations with one of the most eminent of your
professors,--Francis Lieber. Few here, I suppose, now personally
remember Francis Lieber. To most it gives indeed a certain sense of
remoteness to meet one who, as in my case, once held close and even
intimate relations with a German emigrant, distinguished as a publicist,
who as a youth had lain, wounded and helpless, a Prussian recruit, on
the field above Namur. Occurring in June, 1815, two days after Waterloo,
the affair at Namur will soon be a century gone. Of those engaged in
it, the last obeyed the fell sergeant's summons a half score years ago.
It seems remote; but at the time of which I speak Waterloo was
appreciably nearer those in active life than are Shiloh and Gettysburg
now. The Waterloo campaign was then but thirty-eight years removed,
whereas those last are fifty now; and, while Lieber was at Waterloo, I
was myself at Gettysburg.

[2] DeLeon, "Belles, Beaux and Brains of the Sixties," p. 158.

Subsequently, later in life, it was again my privilege to hold close
relations with another Columbian,--an alumnus of this University as it
then was--in whom I had opportunity to study some of the strongest and
most respect-commanding traits of the Southern character. I refer to one
here freshly remembered,--Alexander Cheves Haskell,--soldier, jurist,
banker and scholar, one of a septet of brothers sent into the field by a
South Carolina mother calm and tender of heart, but in silent suffering
unsurpassed by any recorded in the annals whether of Judea or of Rome.