THE GENERAL.

General Lafayette had just entered his seventy-first year.  In his childhood he had been troubled by a weakness of the chest which gave his friends some anxiety.  But his constitution was naturally good, and air, exercise, and exposure gradually wore away every trace of his original debility.  In person he was tall and strongly built, with broad shoulders, large limbs, and a general air of strength, which was rather increased than diminished by an evident tending towards corpulency.  While still a young man, his right leg—­the same, I believe, that had been wounded in rallying our broken troops at the Brandywine—­was fractured by a fall on the ice, leaving him lame for the rest of his days.  This did not prevent him, however, from walking about his farm, though it cut him off from the use of the saddle, and gave a halt to his gait, which but for his dignity of carriage would have approached to awkwardness.  Indeed, he had more dignity of bearing than any man I ever saw.  And it was not merely the dignity of self-possession, which early familiarity with society and early habits of command may give even to an ordinary man, but that elevation of manner which springs from an habitual elevation of thought, bearing witness to the purity of its source, as a clear eye and ruddy cheek bear witness to the purity of the air you daily breathe.  In some respects he was the mercurial Frenchman to the last day of his life; yet his general bearing, that in which he comes oftenest to my memory, was of calm earnestness, tempered and mellowed by quick sympathies.

His method of life was very regular,—­the regularity of thirty years of comparative retirement, following close upon fifteen years of active public life, begun at twenty in the army of Washington, and ending in a Prussian and Austrian dungeon at thirty-five.

His private apartments consisted of two rooms on the second floor.  The first was his bed-room, a cheerful, though not a large room, nearly square, with a comfortable fireplace, and a window looking out upon the lawn and woods behind the castle.  Just outside of the bed-room, and the first object that struck your eye on approaching it from the gallery, was a picture by one of his daughters, representing the burly turnkey of Olmuetz in the act of unlocking his dungeon-door.  “It is a good likeness,” said the General to me, the first time that he took me to his rooms,—­“a very good likeness.  I remember the features well.”  From the bed-room a door opened into a large turret-room, well lighted and airy, and which, taking its shape from the tower in which it stood, was almost a perfect circle.  This was the General’s library.  The books were arranged in open cases, filling the walls from floor to ceiling, and with a neatness and order which revealed an artistic appreciation of their effect.  It was lighted by two windows, one opening on the lawn, the other on the farm-yards, and both,