just before the processional. Tottering to a chancel pew, she threw herself upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs. Scarcely a year before, the wedding march had been played for her, and a joyous throng saw her wedded to gallant Breck Parkman. Before another twelvemonth rolled around the groom was killed at the front.”[1] Samuel Breck Parkman was in the Harvard class following that to which I belonged. Graduating in 1857, fifty-five years later I next saw his name in the connection just given. It recorded an incident of not infrequent occurrence in those dark and cruel days.
It was, however, in Breck Parkman and his like that I first became conscious of certain phases of the South Carolina character which subsequently I learned to bear in high respect.
So far as this University of South Carolina was concerned, it also so chanced that, by the merest accident, I, a very young man, was thrown into close personal relations with one of the most eminent of your professors,—Francis Lieber. Few here, I suppose, now personally remember Francis Lieber. To most it gives indeed a certain sense of remoteness to meet one who, as in my case, once held close and even intimate relations with a German emigrant, distinguished as a publicist, who as a youth had lain, wounded and helpless, a Prussian recruit, on the field above Namur. Occurring in June, 1815, two days after Waterloo, the affair at Namur will soon
- ↑ DeLeon, “Belles, Beaux and Brains of the Sixties,” p. 158.
