18 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



When I first remember my grandfather, in 1846, he was about 

 sixty-five years of age. His appearance and quality even then 

 made a strong impression on me ; thereafter until he died, for the 

 twelve most impressionable years I was much with him, and he 

 influenced me greatly. I was nearer to him than any other of 

 his thirty or more grandchildren, partly because he was pecu- 

 liarly attached to my mother, and partly because I was the only 

 one of the lot by nature in sympathy with his strangely delicate 

 quality, his abiding interest in literature, and his keen insight 

 into men. In his aspect and manner Richard Southgate was an 

 excellent sample of the old, long- vanished class of Virginia gen- 

 tlemen. He was a small person, or at least so appeared among 

 a folk who tended to hugeness of body. He was the last of the 

 folk in his part of the world to hold to the "pig-tail/' queue 

 arrangement of his hair, which was always carefully braided 

 and tied with a bit of ribbon, so that the end of it hung between 

 his shoulders. Toward the end of his life he disused the small- 

 clothes and stockings which were the fit accompaniment of the 

 queue, but he kept to the buckled shoes and the round cloak of 

 the ancient costume. His face, with the white hair strained 

 back like a girl's to her braid, delicate, regularly featured, 

 and smooth shaven, had a womanish look; but the keen alert 

 eyes had all of a man's strength in them. Up to his death, in 

 his eighty-third year, his face kept an unusual share of its 

 youthful quality. 



In his quality, Richard Southgate curiously united the 

 efficiency of an adroit business man with an abiding ever- 

 present interest in the other side of human affairs; in history 

 and literature he was well read and abounded in judgments. 

 He had the reputation of being little given to charity. My 

 father, who was none too sympathetic with him, told me a 

 story which well illustrates his curious ways of dealing with 

 those about him. A tipsy teamster, one of the carriers who in 

 the time before railways transported goods from the Ohio into 

 the back country, while drunk, drove his horses into the river, 



