n from the Academy, in
1824, he was thought an officer of such promise as to make it
expedient to send him to France for the higher military education in
which the country of Napoleon and his marshals then stood pre-eminent.
From 1820, when he entered the Academy as a pupil, to his death in
1871, he was detached from it only these three or four years. Yet this
determination of his life's work proceeded from a mere accident,
scarcely more than a boy's fancy. He had begun the study of medicine,
under Dr. Archer, of Richmond; but he had a very strong wish to learn
drawing. In those primitive days the opportunity of instruction was
wanting where he lived; and hearing that it was taught at the Military
Academy he set to work for an appointment, not from inclination to the
calling of a soldier, but as a means to this particular end. It is
rather singular that he should have had no bias towards the profession
of arms; for although he drifted almost from the first into the civil
branch, as a teacher and then professor, I have never known a man of
more strict and lofty military ideas. The spirit of the profession was
strong in him, though he cared little for its pride, pomp, and
circumstance. I believe that in this observation others who knew him
well agreed with me.

The work of a teacher, however important and absorbing in itself, does
not usually offer much of interest to readers. My father, by the
personal contact of teacher and taught, knew almost every one of the
distinguished generals who fought in the War of Secession, on either
the Union or the Confederate side. With scarcely an exception, they
had been his pupils; but his own life was uneventful. He married, in
1839, Mary Helena Okill, of New York City. My mother's father was
English, her mother an American, but with a strong strain of French
blood; her maiden name, Mary Jay, being that of a Huguenot family
which had left France under Louis XIV. By the time of her birth, in
1786, a good deal of American admixture had doubtless qualified the
original French; but I remember her well, and though she lived to be
seventy-three, she had up to the last a vivacity and keen enjoyment of
life, more French than American, reflected from quick black eyes,
which fairly danced with animation through her interest in her
surroundings.

From my derivation, therefore, I am a pretty fair illustration of the
mix-up of bloods which seems destined to bring forth some new and yet
undeciphe