THE CAZENOVE FAMILY. 163 to me once, "There were in my early days very few religious persons. My minister, Rev. Mr. Woodville, had very obscure views of religion. His preaching was, 'keep the Commandments and Christ will do the rest.'" When eighty-eight years old the Doctor told me he didn't feel any more like dying than when he was young. He, Daniel Minor, Mrs. Wilkinson and Miss Sallie Griffith were four of my communicants in 1864 who had seen General Washington. Mr. Antoine C. Cazenove, father of William and Louis Cazenove, and of Mrs. Willlam C. Gardner, was a gentleman of the old school who dressed in tights, and wore a queue; he was very polite and kind to me. His family was an old Huguenot one of Nismes, France, and at the Edict of Nantes was forced to take refuge at Geneva. In the French Revolution when Robespierre seized Geneva and imprisoned its best citizens, after sixteen had been shot, forty were brought out of prison, among them Paul Cazenove and his two sons, John A. and Antoine Charles. They passed through Germany to Hamburg and England and arrived in November, 1794, at Philadelphia, where Theophilus de Cazenove, a relative, lived. He was agent of the Holland Land Company, and Cazenovia, New York, was named in honor of him. Paul and John returned to France. I knew also Mr. Charles Taylor, father of Mrs. Fowle, and of Charles A. Taylor, who has been active and honored in State affairs and in the Church at Alexandria. He was full of energy and thought nothing of walking to Washington. Communication with Washington was very slow then. Even in 1852 there was an omnibus running between Alexandria and Washington, and my nephew who was staying with me had his ear frozen going up one winter's day. President Jackson wanted a bridge of iron and stone put across the Potomac about the time I came to Virginia. In 1844 it took exactly twenty-five hours to travel from New York to Washington; the ticket cost about $15. That very winter in February the ice was 14 inches on the North River, 10 inches on the Delaware, 8 inches on the Susquehanna, and 6 inches on the Potomac. Alexandria was a place of social and commercial importance. The names of the families living then are in part forgotten by long removal and by death, but it was the centre of a cultivated and refined society. Turnpike roads connected it with the upper 164 CHARLES AND ANNE LEE. part of Virginia, and the carriages for pleasure and the wagons for trade found ready access at all times along the hard roads. We have little idea now of how slow was the communication in Virginia a century ago. On one occasion Mr. Charles Lee, my wife's grandfather, left Alexandria on his circuit to the neighboring county courts. After an absence of nearly a month, as he was approaching Alexandria, on Shooter's Hill he met a burial procession near the family burial-ground there, and some one seeing him, came forward and told him that his wife had died during his absence and was now being carried to the grave. He had the body taken back to Alexandria and the burial later. September, 1804. We can imagine the shock and the distress. Truly a journey then without letters or telegrams was as bad as a sea-voyage is now. I have seen the tombstone of this Anne Lee, my wife's grandmother and daughter of Richard Henry Lee ; it was destroyed or carried off during the war. The epitaph was written by her brother Francis Lightfoot Lee. This was in "This stone is not erected in memory of her piety and virtue for they are registered in heaven; nor of the qualities by which she was adorned, distinguished or endeared, for of these, they who knew her have a more lasting memorial in their sorrow for her death. But it is to remind the reader that neither youth nor beauty nor any excellence of heart or mind can rescue from the grave, for the entombed possessed them all." Before the era of railroads Alexandria was the shipping point for a large part of Virginia-fifty miles to the interior. Heavily loaded wagons with six and eight horses, often with bells, showing as the boys thought that the team had never been "stalled," like the prairie schooners of the West, brought farm products down, and carried back loads of manufactured goods and fish. There were large flouring mills, and King-street flour was known in Liverpool, England. Foreign goods were imported direct; General Washington getting his clothing from England. The fishing industry of the Potomac-shad, rock, and herring-was very large and valuable and centred at Alexandria, and a part of the town on the river, called Fishtown, was a busy place for a large part of the year with the cleaning, salting and packing of the fish. Thousands of barrels of fish were sold, and shipped all over the State, this being the chief point of distribution, and wagons taking them back as return freight. I have known 20,000 shad to be sent to New York in one day. Fishtown is now passing away, its area bare, its trade gone. It was once rented at $5,000 for the three months of the season, but of late its rental for the whole year has not reached $500. It was a colonial public landing and came into the hands of the corporate authorities of Alexandria, adding for many years much to the city revenue. About the time I came some one has told me that there were three hundred wagons in town one day, bringing produce and taking away merchandise. Business was lively all along the way, and there were stopping-places of all sorts, wagon stands, wagon factories, and repair shops. After a time, however, there was a strange falling off in the catch of fish, which was a blow to their trade, and then, as misfortunes never come singly, Alexandria, in a corner of the District of Columbia, from no lack of enterprise on its part, suffered a disastrous change. Virginia ignored the place and Congress regarded it not. The Legislature of Virginia allowed the Baltimore and Ohio railroad to enter the State, and it tapped the resources of Alexandria. If you draw a line from Alexandria to Winchester, and then to Staunton, and another to Alexandria, you can see the area that was affected by the change of market from Alexandria to Baltimore. If Alexandria had been ceded back to Virginia, in time to attract the railroads there at first, we might now see a city like Baltimore, extending even out to this Seminary. The river a mile wide, and deep enough off the wharves for any vessels, might have been a large port. Two "might-have-beens "-first as capital of the United States, and second as a large commercial city-have left Alexandria an ancient city, with its deserted warehouses, decayed and broken wharves, and quiet, sometimes grassgrown streets, on the side, apart from business and politics, "far from the madding crowd." Travellers pass through its poorest streets and say with compassion, "The town is asleep, finished long years ago, and resting in peace." Some one passing up the Potomac had a strong whiff of the guano wafted out and said, "Not only dead, but unburied." I recall a newspaper advertisement of that time to the effect that a certain vessel would "sail all next week" between Alexandria and Philadelphia. A few years before I came to Virginia the Chesapeake and Ohio canal was extended to Alexandria, which it was hoped would bring it much business. At the inauguration of the scheme on the "Common" near town the mayor of Alexandria with many 166 CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL. citizens were present, and a pickaxe with elaborately carved handle was given him with which to break the ground. In the attempt the handle broke, which an ancient augur would have deemed an inauspicious omen. Alexandria reminds me of Salem, Mass., and both were at one time scenes of great activity. One had the West Indian trade, the other the East Indian. Fires have done great damage, the last great fire in 1871 destroying the market house and the town hall with its precious relics of Washington, who was one of the first Master Masons. It is at present growing in population, has 20,000 inhabitants and a number of factories. The monument to the Confederate soldiers who fell in battle is simple, but excellent, and the inscription tells the story: "They died in the consciousness of duty faithfully performed.” The inscription is equally good on the tablet at the Episcopal High School to the old pupils who died in the service of the Confederate States: "Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque jacent," CHAPTER XVII. DOCTORS SPARROW AND MAY. "They are all gone into the world of light; Their very memory is fair and bright, HESE beautiful lines of the poet Henry Vaughan, who died the olden days and my association with the honored and now sainted dead of whom I have been writing in these pages. They specially remind me of the two whose names stand at the head of this article, Dr. Sparrow, my colleague for thirty-three years, and Dr. May, my intimate friend for nearly twenty years. Two other verses of the same poem are appropriate : "It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, Like stars upon some gloomy grove, Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest, After the sun's remove. "I see them walking in an air of glory, Whose light doth trample on my days; My days which are at best but dull and hoary, Dr. William Sparrow, the Seminary's greatest professor, came to us when forty years old from Kenyon College with a high reputation for scholarship, ability and administrative powers. He had been for some years connected with Kenyon College, first with Bishop Chase, his brother-in-law, and then with Bishop McIlvaine. There had been some conflict and friction in both cases, which was afterwards entirely settled. Dr. Sparrow was a born ruler, was well fitted to have authority, and exercised it with discretion. Bishops Chase and McIlvaine were lordly men, and in the College their authority clashed with that of Dr. Sparrow, who was Vice-President and Acting President. We should never have secured him for this place but for this circumstance. They tried to get him back afterwards, but he remained here. Dr. May wrote, in 1851, "We feared lest Dr. Sparrow might be taken from us. He was importuned to return to Kenyon. He ought |