The Valley of Virginia 



Gettysburg. Under a very large black walnut tree General Jack- 

 son had his headquarters in the fall of 1862, and here his meals 

 were brought to him by a son of Carter Hall, who still remem- 

 bers seeing the General seated at a pine table reading his Bible. 

 He also remembers the gallant Stuart as he dashed up and dis- 

 mounted for a consultation with his senior officer. General Jackson 

 had declined an invitation to make his headquarters in the house at 

 Carter Hall upon the ground that the tramp of soldiers' boots and 

 the constant arrival and departure of couriers would disturb the 

 ladies. 



And it was in a room that looks out on these old trees that there 

 had died many years earlier — in 18 13 — a friend of Colonel Bur- 

 well's, Edmund Randolph, Aide-de-Camp to General Washington, 

 and later Governor of Virginia, first Attorney-General of the 

 United States and Secretary of State. 



To the southeast of the house lies another little wood, left 

 perched upon that bluff from the foot of which the great spring 

 gushes; these trees, except for the scythe of Time, are as they have 

 been for longer than the short century and a quarter since the 

 house was built. It is in another part of this same bluff that there 

 is a cave about which many legends cluster, as they do about the 

 whole place. But there Is only space to mention the fact that this 

 cave is the real home of the ghost. 



Unlike most ghosts, this one has a scientific reason for being. 

 Often enough, even to this day, a coach may be heard to rumble 

 up to the portico of the house and the old-fashioned folding steps 

 may be heard bumping down as they are unfolded. It is, of course, 

 very probable that the cave extends under the house and on to the 

 west until it passes beneath the highway. Certain it is, that the 

 road sounds queerly hollow at a certain point, and the unbelieving 

 maintain that the sound of the coach is only that of a truck or a 

 wagon passing over "the hollow place" in the highroad, and that 

 the sound is carried by the cave to the earth under the house a 

 quarter of a mile away. 



[335] 



