The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I | Page 2

long a blast meant that someone was coming. Sam and
I ran down the avenue of elms to see who it was. Sam was my Negro
companion, philosopher, and friend. I was ten years old and Sam said
that he was fourteen. There was constant talk about the war. Many men
of the neighbourhood had gone away somewhere--that was certain; but
Sam and I had a theory that the war was only a story. We had been
fooled about old granny Thomas's bringing the baby and long ago we
had been fooled also about Santa Claus. The war might be another such
invention, and we sometimes suspected that it was. But we found out
the truth that day, and for this reason it is among my clearest early
recollections.
"For, when the train stopped, they put off a big box and gently laid it in
the shade of the fence. The only man at the station was the man who
had come to change the mail-bags; and he said that this was Billy
Morris's coffin and that he had been killed in a battle. He asked us to
stay with it till he could send word to Mr. Morris, who lived two miles
away. The man came back presently and leaned against the fence till
old Mr. Morris arrived, an hour or more later. The lint of cotton was on
his wagon, for he was hauling his crop to the gin when the sad news
reached him; and he came in his shirt sleeves, his wife on the wagon
seat with him.
"All the neighbourhood gathered at the church, a funeral was preached
and there was a long prayer for our success against the invaders, and
Billy Morris was buried. I remember that I wept the more because it

now seemed to me that my doubt about the war had somehow done
Billy Morris an injustice. Old Mrs. Gregory wept more loudly than
anybody else; and she kept saying, while the service was going on, 'It'll
be my John next.' In a little while, sure enough, John Gregory's coffin
was put off the train, as Billy Morris's had been, and I regarded her as a
woman gifted with prophecy. Other coffins, too, were put off from time
to time. About the war there could no longer be a doubt. And, a little
later, its realities and horrors came nearer home to us, with swift, deep
experiences.
"One day my father took me to the camp and parade ground ten miles
away, near the capital. The General and the Governor sat on horses and
the soldiers marched by them and the band played. They were going to
the front. There surely must be a war at the front, I told Sam that night.
Still more coffins were brought home, too, as the months and the years
passed; and the women of the neighbourhood used to come and spend
whole days with my mother, sewing for the soldiers. So precious
became woollen cloth that every rag was saved and the threads were
unravelled to be spun and woven into new fabrics. And they baked
bread and roasted chickens and sheep and pigs and made cakes, all to
go to the soldiers at the front[1]."
The quality that is uppermost in the Page stock, both in the past and in
the present generation, is that of the builder and the pioneer. The
ancestor of the North Carolina Pages was a Lewis Page, who, in the
latter part of the eighteenth century, left the original American home in
Virginia, and started life anew in what was then regarded as the less
civilized country to the south. Several explanations have survived as to
the cause of his departure, one being that his interest in the rising tide
of Methodism had made him uncongenial to his Church of England
relatives; in the absence of definite knowledge, however, it may safely
be assumed that the impelling motive was that love of seeking out new
things, of constructing a new home in the wilderness, which has never
forsaken his descendants. His son, Anderson Page, manifesting this
same love of change, went farther south into Wake County, and
acquired a plantation of a thousand acres about twelve miles north of
Raleigh. He cultivated this estate with slaves, sending his abundant

crops of cotton and tobacco to Petersburg, Virginia, a traffic that made
him sufficiently prosperous to give several of his sons a college
education. The son who is chiefly interesting at the present time,
Allison Francis Page, the father of the future Ambassador, did not
enjoy this opportunity. This fact in itself gives an insight into his
character. While his brothers were grappling with Latin and Greek and
theology--one of them became a Methodist preacher of the hortatory
type for which