ed
the house they were shocked at the dilapidation--sash missing in the
windows, doors off hinges, boards decayed and missing from the house and
porch. Embarrassed, they hesitated to enter when to the door came a man,
the musician. Speaking in a quiet voice, he asked them in. Upon the
piano a large hen was standing, perfectly at ease. The deterioration of
the interior was more pronounced than that of the outside--springs
bursting through upholstery, beds unmade and without linen, neither
carpets upon the floors nor curtains at the windows. Animals wandered in
and out at will. Yet upon the walls hung some portraits and the
furniture had been good. There were many books. The man was obviously
cultivated in his speech and manner. The host collected the stipend for
entering the place and proceeded to show the tourists the house, which
was interesting, and his inventions, which were not; a collection of
senseless, pitiful, useless things.

Upstairs, and downstairs, into this room and that they were taken to be
shown an "invention." Each room was more squalid than the last. Finally
the end in sight, escape near at hand, the gentleman said, "I'll show
you something," and took the Alexandrians into a room opening off the
hall. There was a large mahogany bookcase, sealed by a court order,
which the host opened at will, carefully replacing what he took out
after it had been examined. One of the strangers, flipping the pages of
an old book, saw the signature of Robert E. Lee, Alexandria, Virginia.
Startled, she asked where the book had come from. "It was my father's,"
was the simple reply. "That is my father," pointing to an old oil
portrait of a clergyman. "He lived in Alexandria. He was rector of
Christ Church."

Not long after this a Negro, arrested in the West, but formerly employed
in Natchez, was purported to have confessed to the murder for which
these people had been tried and acquitted.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Chapter 11

The Presbyterian Meetinghouse

[In 1928 the church was restored as a shrine and the cemetery put in
order by a group of persons, many of whom were descendants of the
original society members. In 1940 the Alexandria Association replaced
the missing pulpit with one, which while not a replica, conveys the
spirit if not the pattern of that destroyed. Ecclesiastical settlement
has vested the property in the name of the Second Presbyterian Church of
Alexandria.

Before this book goes