Before he was thirty he was in Congress and was even then reputed the greatest orator of our State, where orators are so plentiful.  He married my mother, his second cousin, Julia Lee, of Richmond, at twenty-five, and from then until the attack of that ruthless money-shark, led a life such as a true man would map out for himself if his Maker granted him the privilege.  You would have to visit at our home to appreciate my father’s character and to understand how terrible this sorrow is to him.  Every morning of his life he spends an hour after breakfast with my dear mother, who is a cripple from hip disease.  He takes her in his arms and brings her down from her room to the library as if she were a child.  He then reads to her—­and he knows good books as well as he knows his friends.  After he takes mother back to her room, he gives an hour to our people, the blacks of the plantation and his white tenants throughout the county.  He is a father to them all.  He settles all their troubles, big and little.  Then for hours he and I go over his business affairs.  Every afternoon from four to five he devotes to his estates and the men and women for whom he acts as trustee.  He has often said to me:  ’We have a clear million of money and property, and that is all any man should have in America.  It is all he is entitled to under our form of government.  Any more than that an honest man should in one way or another return to the people from whom he has taken it.  I never want my family to have more than a million dollars.’  When he went into the Seaboard affair, he explained to me that it was to assist the Wilsons—­they were old friends, and he has acted as their solicitor for years—­in building up the South.  He discussed with me the right and advisability of putting in the trust funds.  He said he considered it his duty to employ them as he did his own in enterprises that would aid the whole people of the South, instead of sending them to the North to be used in Wall Street as belting for the ‘System’ grinder.  These fortunes were made in the South by men who loved their section of the country more than they did wealth, and why should they not be employed to benefit that part of the country which their makers and owners loved?  I remember vividly how perplexed he was when, at the beginning, the Wilsons would show him that the investments were returning unusually large profits.

“‘It is not right, Beulah,’ he said to me one morning after receiving a letter from Baltimore to the effect that Seaboard stock and bonds had advanced until his investment showed over fifty per cent, profit, ’it is not right for us to make this money.  No man in America should make over legal rates of interest and a fair profit on an investment, that is, an investment of capital pure and simple, particularly in a transportation company, where every dollar of profit comes from the people who patronise the lines.  I have worked it out on every side, and it is not right; it would not be legal if the people, who make the laws for their own betterment, understood their affairs as they should.’