Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/102

 highly colored narratives of their encounter with the Black Horse Cavalry. Around each narrator gathered a knot of eager listeners whose interest was heightened by the consciousness each possessed of the surrounding uncertainties. General Winfield Scott, whom we saw upon horseback, seemed both too old and too corpulent for responsibility in such a crisis. My grandfather and his brother were both concerned for the fortunes of General McDowell, for the personal reason that he had married a daughter of Burden of Troy, New York, of whom they were the business representatives in Philadelphia. We had influence enough to get from Drake DeKay, whose autograph was apparently made with a pair of tongs, a pass to enter the various fortifications which were being rapidly constructed for the defense of the city. We likewise drove across the Long Bridge and to Arlington, which was then not a cemetery, and to Alexandria, where we saw the house in which the rebel tavern-keeper, Jackson, had shot Colonel Ellsworth and had himself fallen a few minutes later. It is difficult for those of the present day to understand what a wave of intense emotion spread over the land when Ellsworth was killed, but they can secure some idea of it by observing what a number of living men bear the name Elmer E. He was young, courageous and attractive, and became one of the earliest sacrifices offered up to the moloch of slavery. At the capitol I was introduced to Emerson Etheridge, one of the congressmen from Tennessee, who remained loyally at his post, notwithstanding the action of his state. Dark-eyed, slight in build and voluble, he spat tobacco juice right and left over the beautiful marble which adorned the fireplace of the committee-room. I also met Potter of Wisconsin—short, chunky and muscular—who was then in great repute, because when Roger A. Pryor of Virginia, a cadaverous fireeater, challenged him to a duel, he accepted and selected bowie knives as the weapons. Thereupon Pryor withdrew upon the theory that they were not the weapons 92