Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 35.djvu/139

Rh To Gerald Smythe, Esq., of England, Lee Camp, of this city, has paid merited tribute in recognition of singular devotion on the part of a foreigner to the Lost Cause, so dear to the hearts of the veterans of the South. The appreciation of the camp is expressed in a letter to Mr. Smythe informing him of his election as an honorary member of the body a signal honor, rarely bestowed.

The matter was brought to the attention of the camp in a letter from Captain W. Gordon McCabe to Judge George L. Christian. During the summer Captain McCabe spent several months abroad, and while in England he became acquainted with a most unusual circumstance, which he communicated to the veterans at length through the letter to Judge Christian. The incident is best described in the words of Captain McCabe himself.

A writer in the London Times, in reviewing, in October, Sir George Trevelyan's 'American Revolution,' had made a bad blunder touching the ancestry of General Charles Lee, confounding the Cheshire family with that from which sprung 'the Lees of Virginia.'

"I wrote a letter to the Times correcting the blunder, and, fortunately, dated it from my London club, 'The Athenaeum.' On the afternoon of the day on which it was published came to me a most cordial letter from Gerald Smythe, Esq., one of the solicitors for the London and Northwest Railway, stating that he would greatly like to meet me, and proposing that I should