University of Virginia Library

12. TWELFTH INSTALLMENT.

“BOYS now that we are all pretty well off, suppose
we teach these rich people that there are other ways of
summering than by going to mountain-resorts, seasides,
Saratogas, Europes and things.”

“Good!” said they; “what shall we do?”

We took our wives and children (Fisher's family was
immense, and Elder's little smaller), plenty of large,
clean, well-made tents, cooks, ostlers, washerwomen,
nurses, and other servants, with dead loads of cooking
utensils, fowling-pieces, fishing-rods, etc., and no end of
all sorts of the best provisions and the finest wines, and
leisurely made our way up through the Southside counties,
encamping at night, or on rainy days, in the most
charming nooks, dells, glades, and forest places we could
find, and we found them in abundance, and more beautiful
than we dreamed could be found. The children
were wild with joy at this free life; the boys and girls
who were nearly grown found a fascination in this
nomadic existence that quite enraptured them, and the
elders—upon my soul, I believe they enjoyed it even
more than the young people!

We intended originally to “do” the mountains of
Southwest Virginia, but concluded to go for a while into
Patrick and Henry, a field little known to artists and
tourists, and which we enjoyed very much. Then turning,
we traveled by easy stages through Pittsylvania,
Halifax, Mecklenburg, Lunenburg, Brunswick, Greenesville,
Southampton, etc., keeping as far from railroads

as possible, and saw the last, the very last, of Old Virginia
life. The pictures of negroes, old and young; of
dilapidated farms and farm-houses of every kind; the
interiors of homesteads, humble and proud (once proud),
which had not been touched by war, and but little by
time, and the descriptions accompanying them, done by
my own hand, are (I make bold to say it) by odds the
best that ever were done by anybody, and, taken as a
whole, make an invaluable compendium for the historian
and antiquary.[1]

Reaching home about the last of October, delighted,
without ague, although we had been badly apple-brandied
at points, our account of our travels so ravished our
friends that for many years afterwards tent-life in Southside
Virginia became extremely fashionable, and, with
various modifications, has been more or less adopted in
all parts of the United States—especially by the wealtheir
classes, and by hardy young men who despise the foolery
of springs and seasides. Judge W. W. Crump took the
lead in this wholesome reform.[2]

Soon after my return, I walked out one day to Hollywood.
There, to my excessive mortification, I found that
a Northern admirer of John R. Thompson had erected a
handsome tomb over the poet—a gentle soul, that loved
above all things to do a kind deed for foes as well as
friends. Although I had predicted that Virginians would
no more build a monument to Thompson than Americans
to Washington, and that the work in Hollywood,
if done at all, would be done by a Yankee,[3] I was mortified
none the less. I had plenty of money—there was

no earthly excuse for me; but, Virginian like, I kept
putting it off and off, and off. I am ashamed of myself.

Here I am reminded that I encouraged as much as
possible the erecting by wealthy and public-spirited citizens
of single figures and groups in bronze or marble,
commemorative of incidents and characters in Virginia
history, at various points along the boulevard that encircled
Richmond, and in Parke Park allowed a few
beautiful tombs to be built in suitable situations. Amid
the beauties, natural and artificial, of the park, these
tombs fitted in admirably, serving, by contrast, and a
certain tenderness of suggestion, to impart an increased
and hallowing charm to the scenery—much like the undertone
of sadness that one sometimes finds in the liveliest
music.[4]

In a moment of vanity I determined to reprint everything
I had ever written — every editorial, magazine-article,
letter, communication, all the correspondence of
“Zed,” “Hermes,” “Malou,” [5] etc., etc., all the squibs
of every kind contributed to the Lynchburg, Richmond,
Petersburg, Orange Court-House, Baltimore, New York,
Louisville, Nashville, Knoxville, and Gordonsville papers,
and to have every solitary thing down to the puns and
conundrums illustrated. This was the life-work of my
friend, that excellent man and accomplished draughtsman,
W. L. Sheppard. Willie got along finely until he got to
the loathsome and disgusting article on “Spit;”[6] in
attempting to illustrate that he was attacked with such
incessant retching and persistent nausea that he fled to
Italy for relief, and had to stay there and in the Alps for
three years before he was cured. For a time he was (Dr.
Brown-Séquard assured me) as badly off as Sumner—had

to have the moxa, actual cautery, Vienna paste, hypodermics,
etc., to spine—but did eventually get well without
going to the United States Senate.

The remaining illustrations were done by Randolph
Mason, a rising young artist, and my books, “Adams's
Complete Works,” in twenty-six volumes, octavo, were
finally published, had no sale except in odd volumes,
adorned the library of every friend to whom I presented
them, and afforded me during my declining years most
delicious reading. I can say with perfect truth that I
never enjoyed any author half so much, and for many
years never read any other.

In another moment of much more vanity I allowed my
friends to induce Valentine to persuade me to sit for my
statue. At first it was decided to have the statue of
bronze, quadruple life-size, in a sitting posture, under Mr.
Exall's lovely duomo, with Hart's sweet little Henry Clay
standing up in my lap, with my hands about his waist and
under his coat-tail, dandling him. But this, though neat
and suggestive, it was thought would be a reflection upon
the “Great American System,” and to my regret was
abandoned. Then it was unanimously concluded best to
build me in the attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, forty
feet high, straddling the City Springs,[7] in copperas-colored
pants, and long-tail, bob-tail coat, striped white and red
vest, oznaburg shirt with open collar, no cravat, and a
straw hat, playing upon a pumpkin-vine horn with both
hands, after the manner of the antique performer upon
the fistula or flute. It was so established, and the remains
of it remain to this day. The material used was an appropriate
clay from the county of Powhatan, the same
that the world-famous pipes[8] are made of. Naughty boys
soon snow-balled the pumpkin-vine out of my hands, and
by dint of large pebbles obtained from the adjacent gullies

were not long in ridding me of my entire head; but the
magnificent torso still stands, and is much sought after
and admired by Hellenists from Heidelberg and Bonn.
Dr. William Hand Browne has devoted an entire “Green
Table” in the Southern Magazine to a discussion of its
great and growing merits. In revenge for this ill treatment
on the part of the boys, I directed Valentine to fill
me an order for seven hundred busts of the finest and
prettiest women of my acquantance, which he did; they
now adorn my house in Appomattox.

To the end that I might die with the reputation of
being the best loved man in Virginia, I had done a great
many good and wise deeds—at least I thought so. But
before I started to do anything at all, I tried to impress
upon myself the fact which I had long known—that there
is the other side to everything—that existence, life itself,
is a balance of opposing qualities,[9] and that no wholly
and lastingly good thing can ever be done. Flowers rot,
beauty rots, religions rot, and the rottenness reappears in
beauty again forever and forever. Life rests on incessant
putrescence. Though these facts were ingrained in me,
I was not satisfied. I wanted to be honored of Virginia
men and to be hurrahed over. I would walk whole
squares in Richmond without having a hat lifted to me or
a small boy to follow me and to say, not without agitation,
“that's him.” This would never do.

Therefore and because I had all along been intent upon
it, I builded my Folly, Adams's Folly. It stands in
Scuffletown to this day, upon a hill carved around clean
down to its base to receive it and be its pedestal, to be
seen and to be seen a very great distance, of all men. It
is an octagonal mass of rough-hewn siennite that rises
some one thousand one hundred (counting from the river
level, one thousand three hundred and fifty) feet in air.
Upon its top there is a bell, compared to which the big
bell at Moscow is but an infant's thimble. This bell rings
of itself on stormy nights, and its mournful sound is heard

in Philadelphia. [By the way, I had intended to stop
the Folly at the height of one thousand feet, but a Philadelphia
centennial creature having built a tower that high,
I went one hundred feet higher, exclusive of the cliff on
which the Folly stands.] Houses in Richmond shake
under the vibrations of this bell, nobody sleeps in many
counties around Lynchburg, and all the Tobacco Row
mountain neighborhood goes to prayers at sundown and
ceases not till day breaks and the bell stops ringing. It
is a fearful thing, that bell lifted up upon that huge,
rough tower, above the clouds oftentimes. There are
steps inside, but everybody prefers to ride up in the steam
elevator at a charge of twenty-five cents. Myriads of
people come to see it. It is one of the wonders of the
world. The annual revenue from sight-seers is a quarter
of a million, which goes into the Lynchburg treasury for
the support of the poor and the improvement of street
grades. People have ceased to be bow-legged, swaybacked,
and knock-kneed in that city. A splendid
bridge for foot-passengers, carriages and railway trains runs
from the foot of the Folly tower to the adjacent hill-top
in Lynchburg, is much resorted to by industrious burghers
with long fishing-lines (to fish in the river for mud-kittens
two hundred and fifty feet below), and is of great
service to through travel on the Washington City, Virginia
Midland, and Great Southern Railroad. I do not
remember what the thing cost. Mr. A. Y. Lee[10] was the
architect. I had speculated in West Virginia coal lands,
made one hundred millions in addition to my original
fifty millions, and didn't care what it cost. It was finished
quicker than the great pyramid. Five hundred thousand
men did the work within ten years.

Goodness knows I was honored enough when the Folly
was completed. I thought I would be. The inauguration
day was a gala day all around the globe. Men
thought the tower of Babel theory was overthrown, as if
that were any comfort. I happened to be in New York

arranging with my publishers when I was telegraphed for
in hot haste. Many brass bands, Gesangveriens, photo
graphers, several yoke of strong-minded women, historical
societies, a herd of reporters, and three Schutzenfests
accompanied me. It was a triumphal march the whole
way. I was transported through Washington in a palan-quin,
toted by four members of the cabinet, the Emperor
in front and on foot, clearing the way with a black wagon-whip
with brass nails in the handle. The train, drawn
by six to ten locomotives, stretched from Alexandria to
Fairfax Station nearly. All Orange Court-House, Gordonsville,
and Charlotteville fell down in the red dust
before me as the train went by. Not a living soul was
left in the Ragged Mountains. The keeper of the Miller
Orphan Asylum[11] set fire to the institution, and went
along with the rest on foot before day. I disembarked
on the Amherst side, descended the gulch into which the
old toll bridge leads, and in a linen duster commenced
the ascent of a grand staircase (hewn out of the living
rock) which begins precisely on the spot where old Aunt
Sally Taylor[12] used to live. All Virginia seemed to be
around me. Although the world claimed the Folly as a
boon to humanity, Virginia claimed it as her own. Now
this great State would be settled up; now our unrivaled
natural resources would be developed, and now, beyond
all shadow or possibility of peradventure, Norfolk would
become the greatest seaport of the earth, and New York
and Baltimore would be nowhere. The big bell tolled.
The people (the landscape was black with them) hollered.
I detected the voice of Trash Green.[13] It was a great
time.

At the head of the grand staircase, Mr. Robin Terry[14]
(in the attitude of Virginia or the Goddess of Liberty, in
a bell-crowned hat with curved brim, and trampling on
the prostrate form of Mr. Jack Slaughter[15] ) received me.
Over their heads, Mr. Tom Stabler[16] on the one side and
Mr. Bob Latham on the other held aloft the great motto
in golden letters, Sic Semper Tyrannis. Mr. Terry's
speech was a noble effort. When he let up, Jack Slaughter
and the latter put off the robes of the tyrant, and
donned his own sack-coat, and proclaimed that the days
of the grinding oppression of poverty in Virginia were
ended, to return no more while time lasted, there went
up a shout that shook the hills, and made the Folly wabble
from base to summit. My reply to these admirable
addresses was a feeble one,—I wanted to go to Peter
Wren's, and take a nip of plain whisky and water—but
all the Lynchburg papers, all the Virginia papers, and all
the papers all over the world said it was a sublime effort.
I doubt it. Then the people went delirious with excitement
and delight, and I went to the Washington House
and went to bed. Scoville said he thought I was sick.
It was a great time.

Sated with human applause, and conscious that my
Folly, not my sense or my goodness, had won it, my
parks, banks, factories, churches, cathedrals, music-halls,
colleges, and lecture-rooms all running more or less successfully,
naught much [N. M. is respectfully submitted
to the Dispatch—Ed. Whig] remained for me to do—
time was for me to depart. We all do fade as a leaf.
Moreover, between the tens and twenties [of 1900, doubtless—
Whig], my dear, good wife went from me. What
she was to me—her forbearance, her long-suffering, her
uncomplaining patience, her devotion to our children,

and, above all, her clear understanding of the whimsies
incident to my peculiar temperament, and of those who
preceded me and gave me my temperament,—why tell of
these, or who cares to hear them? She it was who ennoble
womankind (always loveable before I knew her)
and humanity in my eyes. I cannot praise her as Stuart
Mill praised his wife,—a woman no whit the superior of
mine in moral if in mental (which I doubt) nature, but
this I will say of her—that a more thoroughly truthful
soul, a more loyal and steadfast friend, never dwelt on
this planet. The man or woman who had her friendship
(not that it was hard to get) had that which was above
price, and which only persistent crime, meanness, or
lying could take away. That I shall be worthy to
draw nigh unto her in the other life I very much question,
but this I hope—that on some celestial morning two
bright sinless boys will take the poor newly-come sinner
between them and, leading him to her sweet presence,
say,—

“Mother, receive him for our sake.”

She died before she was seventy, in the prime of the
strength which came to her late in life, when the cares,
griefs, and toils of her clouded youth and early womanhood
were ended; and I mourned her truly, as a man
mourns who has no other friend this side the grave.[17]
Ah, me! how many, many friends there are now on the
other side! I hope they all are still my friends, for
often, and often, and often my heart goes out how
warmly to them. I do not forget them. They are with

me now more than are my living friends—far more. I
feel their presence, their veritable existence. They live
in me.

No man knows, not even the widower himself, how much
he suffers. Cleave frail man smoothly from calvarium to
os coccygis, and it is but natural that he should desire to
find his lost if not better half, and not go single-legged
and with only one eye on the world all his days. It is
for this cause that widowers walk lop-sided and hip-shot,
and are so anxious to get married again. Not that they
want to marry for the mere sake of marrying—well they
know that is not what it is cracked up to be—but they
feel a-cold on one side, and yearn to pour out their grief
on some friendly and sympathetic bosom. Thus the early
courting of widowers, which is so much decried, is, if we
did but know it, a secret commingling of tears for the
loved and lost one; and as the commingling is all done
and over by the time the new marriage comes off, it is but
fit and proper that the two grief-relieved souls should be a
trifle gay and cheerful. But they often cry together afterwards—especially
the lady.

Being a lad of a little upwards of a century, and maintaining,
as widowers all do, that I was unfazed by time
and as good as ever stuck axe in a tree, which I was not
and never had been, it was natural and becoming that I
should want to get married again without indecorous and
heartless delay; but that I should make such a poop and
rancid old ass of myself as to court a mischievous little
miss of six-and-twenty, or thereabouts, I could not have
believed. I did, though. There was a blue-eyed, red-faced,
yellow-haired girl at Ca Ira (I moved to the country
soon after my wife died), that wound me around her finger,
trotted me around, showed me off, made a laughing-stock
of me, and then kicked me into the infinite void[18] with
the full and unrelenting power of a very ponderous limb.
That woman lied to me in every conceivable way. She
lied with her eyes, she lied with her smiles, she lied with

her gestures, with a thousand undulations of her graceful
body; her life, for six months, was a continuous and unbroken
lie, only she did not tell me in actual words that
she loved me. And so, with a conscience void of offense,
she went off and married a Pikelin or some such creature.
But what a conscience! A cambric thread of the finest
fibre would cover it like a counterpane. And yet nature,
in her ample indifference (I can't call it economy), has a
place for myriads of such immoral nits. The good of
them at any time, past, present, and to come, is not apparent
to me. To Pikelins and such they may be blessing,
possibly. But as for me, I am done with women. We all
do fade as a leaf.

When my mind was made up to move finally into the
country (my summers having heretofore been spent in
various rural retreats, so called, which I had purchased
from time to time), I did not set to work with my abundant
money to re-create the Domain of Arnheim on Poe's
plan, the cottage of Landor, a villa in the Italian style, or
anything of the kind. My highest ambition was to rebuild
Captain Grigg's house just as it was in the olden time, and
this I would certainly have done had not all or nearly all
the trees between there and the Knob been cut down.
The place was too open and exposed. I bought Evans's
mill and all the land I could get in the neighborhood,
divided it up into farms, with snug farm-houses, etc., and
portioned them out to the children of William Gannaway
and William Anderson, my cousins. For myself I found
no resting place for the sole of my foot until I got into
the wooded country near Pamplin's Depot. There I built
an exact fac simile of Captain Grigg's—a little dormer-storied
house, with a cool basement dining-room and
cellar adjoining, a front porch with saddle-closet cut off
from it, big outside chimneys (to encourage the friends of
my childhood—toads), a covered brick passage for the
wind to blow through, the water-pail, and the wood ready
chopped for the fire, to set in, and then a tail of little
rooms on different levels running down the hill—so that
you had to step up or down to get into any room in the
house. I had a barn, stable, corn-house, kitchen, quarters,
dairy with F-like lattice-work under the eaves, a well, a

glorious well, with well-house over it, a carriage-house,
horse-block and rack, spring and spring-house fifty yards
or so from the dwelling, a damson tree or two, with some
greengage plums in the yard, oaks, aspens, and locusts, a
regular ley-hopper, big biscuit-block and great open fire-place
in the kitchen, hen-hovels, duck-troughs, meat-house,
weaving-room, loom, vast gobbler, an authoritative
rumpless rooster, devoted to the society of the ladies, and
a square-shouldered, deliberate drake, very affable to his
family, flax-hackles, reel, wool-cards, spinning-wheels,
everything, including peacock and chatty guinea chickens.
Other people might live as they pleased, I intended to live
like a Virginian. I had money and money “in a plenty;”
why not? In my garden were lilacs and hollyhocks,
gooseberries, raspberries, currants, etc., a fig bush or two,
some hazelnut bushes, artichokes and grass-nuts; a patch
for broomcorn, and reeds for fishing-poles, gourds along
the fence and cymlins at intervals; I had besides, a nice
pond with abundant bullfrogs, a dam and mill-pond full
of chub and silver perch, and an old-fashioned saw-mill,
with a saw that worked up and down like a distracted man
in a jump-jacket. This for company when I felt lonesome;
and as I took good care not to cultivate much of
my land, there was never wanting gullies and galls, with
a pretence of bresh and corn-stalks to cure them—I
wouldn't have cured 'em for the world—great store of
mulleins, hen-nest grass, sassafras, thorn-bushes, Chero-kee
plums in detached squads, isolated persimmon-trees,
brier patches, dewberry vines, old fields with and without
old field pines—good for setting-turkeys and old hares—
a right sharp chance of sour, sobby, crawfishy land, some
puffy land, some places where the water seeped out, some
old gray not quite dead cherry-trees, a lost and rather
bony Lombardy poplar or so, some huge high pines not
far from the house for the sake of woodpeckers, low
grounds for kildees and watermelons, a good-sized creek
with three or four regularly baited fishing-places, a collection
of tall naked sycamores for buzzards to roost in,
four mules, three yoke of oxen, twelve caws to the pail, a
jinny and a hinny, an amiable sleepy-headed horse for my
own riding, and a milk and cider filly, with a side-saddle,
nankeen riding-skirt, and sun-bonnet for any lady who
might happen to pay me a visit.

I had also not quite a gross of hounds, beagles, pointers,
setters, bulldogs, and bench-leg fice, all to keep company,
and a sociable but exasperating cat, that would sit
and doze, and blink by the fire, and see a mouse run up
my breeches leg, and blink and doze and look up in my
face like an insensate, hairy, slit-eyed Chinese simpleton,
until I didn't know what I was ready to do to that cat if
I hadn't been superstitious and afraid. A cat like that is
a bad cat. I had me also a convenient wood-pile (nothing
but wood was burnt in my house), with plenty of oak and
hickory, plenty of pine too, and lots of chips and light-wood
knots, with a white-oak basket (not a big, new white
white-oak basket, but a little old black white-oak basket,
with a hole burnt in one side, jagged edges, and a swinging
handle, loose at one end), to hold my chips and corn
husses.