University of Virginia Library

RANDOLPH AND VEGETABLE LIFE.

Mr. William H. Elliott relates the following story:

"I sometimes on Friday evening accompanied my schoolfellow,
Tudor Randolph, who was an amiable youth, to
Roanoke, to hunt and fish and swim.

"The house was so completely and closely environed
by trees and underwood of original growth, that it seemed
to have been taken by the top and let down into the
bosom of a dense virgin forest. Mr. Randolph would
never permit even a switch to be cut anywhere near the
house. Without being aware of such an interdiction I
one day committed a serious trespass.

"Tudor and I were one day roving in the woods near
the house, when I observed a neat hickory plant, about
an inch thick, which I felled. Tudor expressed his regret
after seeing what I had done, saying he was afraid
his uncle would be angry. I went immediately to Mr.
Randolph and informed him of what I had ignorantly
done, and expressed regret for it.

"He took the stick, looked pensively at it for some seconds,
as if commiserating its fate. Then looking at me
more in sorrow than in anger, he said:

"`Sir, I would not have had it done for fifty Spanish
milled dollars!'

"I had seventy-five cents in my pocket, at that time
called four-and-sixpence, and had some idea of offering it
to the owner of the premises as an equivalent for the
damage I had done, but when I heard about the fifty
Spanish milled dollars, I was afraid of insulting him by
offering the meagre atonement of seventy-five cents. I
wished very much to get away from him, but thought it
rude to withdraw abruptly without knowing whether he
was done with me.

Peyton Randolph, President
First Continental Congress
Relative to John Randolph

"`Did you want this for a cane?'

"No, sir.

"`No, you are not old enough
to need a cane.'

"`Did you want it for any particular
purpose?'

"No, sir, I only saw it was a
pretty stick, and thought I'd cut
it.

"He said, we can be justified
in taking animal life, only to furnish
us food, or to remove some hurtful object out of
the way. We cannot be justified in taking even vegetable
life without having some useful object in view.

"He then quoted the following lines from Cowper.

"`Now," he continued, `God Almighty planted this
thing, and you have killed it without any adequate object.

It would have grown to a large nut-tree, in whose
boughs numerous squirrels would have gamboled and
feasted on its fruit. Those squirrels in their turn might
have furnished food for some human beings.'

"Here he made a pause, but looked as if he had something
more to say, yet only added.

` "I hope and believe, sir, you will never do the like
again.' "Never, sir never!"

"He got up and put the stick in a corner, and I made
my escape to Tudor in an adjacent room, where he had
remained an invisible but sympathizing auditor of this
protacted rebuke.

"It was some time before I could cut a switch or a fishing
rod without feeling that I was doing some sort of violence
to the economy of the vegetable kingdom.

"When reflecting on this passage of my boyish history,
I have thought that Mr. Randolph's tenderness for vegetable
life, as evinced on this occasion, was strangely contrasted
with the terrific onslaughts he sometimes perpetrated
on human feelings. But Mr. Randolph was not
a subject for ordinary speculation. He would sometimes
surprise his enemy by unexpected civility, and anon,
mortify his friend by undeserved abruptness.

"He was an edition of Man, of which there was but one
copy, and he was that copy. Sometimes he would take
the whole world in the arms of his affection. When in
a different mood, he seemed ready to hurl the offending
planet into the furnace of the sun."