According to his own account he had been in the
early days of his Texas career a drunkard. "Everybody got drunk," I once
heard him say, referring to the beginning of the Texas revolution, as
he gave a side-splitting picture of that bloody episode, "and I realized
that somebody must get sober and keep sober."

From the hour of that realization, when he "swore off," to the hour of
his death he never touched intoxicants of any sort.

He had fought under Jackson, had served two terms in Congress and had
been elected governor of Tennessee before he was forty. Then he fell
in love. The young lady was a beautiful girl, well-born and highly
educated, a schoolmate of my mother's elder sister. She was persuaded by
her family to throw over an obscure young man whom she preferred, and to
marry a young man so eligible and distinguished.

He took her to Nashville, the state capital. There were rounds of
gayety. Three months passed. Of a sudden the little town woke to the
startling rumor, which proved to be true, that the brilliant young
couple had come to a parting of the ways. The wife had returned to her
people. The husband had resigned his office and was gone, no one knew
where.

A few years later Mrs. Houston applied for a divorce, which in those
days had to be granted by the state legislature. Inevitably reports
derogatory to her had got abroad. Almost the first tidings of Governor
Houston's whereabouts were contained in a letter he wrote from somewhere
in the Indian country to my father, a member of the legislature to whom
Mrs. Houston had applied, in which he said that these reports had come
to his ears. "They are," he wrote, "as false as hell. If they be not
stopped I will return to Tennessee and have the heart's blood of him who
repeats them. A nobler, purer woman never lived. She should be promptly
given the divorce she asks. I alone am to blame."

She married again, though not the lover she had discarded. I knew her
in her old age--a gentle, placid lady, in whose face I used to fancy
I could read lines of sorrow and regret. He, to close this chapter,
likewise married again a wise and womanly woman who bore him many
children and with whom he lived happy ever after. Meanwhile, however, he
had dwelt with the Indians and had become an Indian chief. "Big Drunk,
they called me," he said to his familiars. His enemies averred that he
brought into the world a whole tribe of half-breeds.

II

Houston was a rare perform