A PILGRIMAGE TO THE "WHITE" 333 



will find it a great gathering place for the wealth and 

 beauty of the South; a place bubbling over with 

 revelry, amusement, flirting, and love-making. He 

 may witness there the excitement and seduction of 

 the "green-baize table" and possibly find enough ma- 

 terial to furnish a tragic chapter for his fiction. If 

 he should need stories of the Civil War he can fill 

 his brain-pan with any quantity of incidents that 

 happened in and about the " White " during " our late 

 unpleasantness." 



The hotel was used, at one time, as a hospital for 

 Northern troops ; at another, as a stable and resting- 

 place for the Confederates. Being only five miles 

 from the Virginia line this watering-place was looked 

 upon as neutral territory. Here, from the earliest 

 days of the nineteenth century, presidents have spent 

 their holidays and held court, and dispensed official 

 patronage under the old oaks that lift their stately 

 heads above the lawn. Here senators, representa- 

 tives, governors and bankers have met on the hotel 

 porches or under its cottage roofs and discussed their 

 pet measures of national, state and financial policy. 



A southern colonel who had lost everything dur- 

 ing the war except his love for whiskey came to 

 sojourn at the "White." He was never known to 

 have any money, but was generally flitting around 

 the bar, waiting for the refrain "come and take 

 suthin', Colonel," which invitation he was never 



