e. His success,
for such he deemed it, was due to his own merit. One of his Mexican
comrades, Major D.H. Hill, afterwards his brother-in-law, was a
professor in a neighbouring institution, Washington College, and had
been consulted by the Superintendent of the Institute as to the
filling of the vacant chair.

Hill remembered what had been said of Jackson at West Point: "If the
course had been one year longer he would have graduated at the head
of his class." This voluntary testimonial of his brother cadets had
not passed unheeded. It had weight, as the best evidence of his
thoroughness and application, with the Board of Visitors, and Jackson
was unanimously elected.

The Military Institute, founded twelve years previously on the model
of West Point, was attended by several hundred youths from Virginia
and other Southern States. At Lexington, in the county of Rockbridge,
a hundred miles west of Richmond, stand the castellated buildings and
the wide parade ground which formed the nursery of so many
Confederate soldiers. To the east rise the lofty masses of the Blue
Ridge. To the north successive ranges of rolling hills, green with
copse and woodland, fall gently to the lower levels; and stretching
far away at their feet, watered by that lovely river which the
Indians in melodious syllables called Shenandoah, "bright daughter of
the Stars," the great Valley of Virginia,

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows,

lies embosomed within its mountain walls. Of all its pleasant market
towns, Lexington is not the least attractive; and in this pastoral
region, where the great forests stand round about the corn-fields,
and the breezes blow untainted from the uplands, had been built the
College which Washington, greatest of Virginians and greatest of
American soldiers, had endowed. Under the shadow of its towers the
State had found an appropriate site for her military school.

The cadets of the Institute, although they wore a uniform, were
taught by officers of the regular army, were disciplined as soldiers,
and spent some months of their course in camp, were not destined for
a military career. All aspirants for commissions in the United States
army had to pass through West Point; and the training of the State
colleges--for Virginia was not solitary in the possession of such an
institution--however much it may have benefited both the minds and
bodies of the rising generation, was of immediate value o