I don’t see why I didn’t understand and begin to defend Sam from himself right then instead of going carelessly and light-heartedly to Europe and letting him manage his own affairs.  I didn’t even write to him, except when I saw anything that interested or moved me, and then I just scribbled “remind me to tell you about this” on a post-card and sent it to him.  You can seal some friends up in your heart and forget about them, and when you take them out they are perfectly fresh and good, but they may have changed flavor.  That is what Sam did, and I am not surprised that the rural flavor of what he offered me out there in dirt lane shocked me slightly.  I didn’t think then that I liked it and I also felt that I wished I had stayed by Sam at that wobbling period of his career; but, on the other hand, it was plainly my duty to go to Europe with Mabel and Peter Vandyne and Miss Greenough.  The inclination to do two things at once is a sword that slices you in two, as the man in the Bible wanted to do to the baby to make enough of him for the two mothers; and that is the way I felt about Peter and Sam as I whirled along the road.  I am afraid Sam is going to be the hardest to manage.  He is harder than Peter by nature.  If Sam had just taken to drink instead of farming I would have known better what to do.  I reformed Peter in one night in Naples when he took too much of that queer Italian wine merely because it was his birthday.  I used tears, and he said it should never happen again.  I don’t believe it has, or he wouldn’t have got an act and a half of his “Epic of American Life” finished as he told me he had done when I dined with him in New York the night I landed.  I missed Peter dreadfully when he left us in London in June, and so did Miss Greenough and Mabel, though she is his sister.  We all felt that if he had been with us it wouldn’t have taken us all these months of that dreadful war to get comfortably home.  Peter said at the dock that he hadn’t drawn a full breath since war had been declared until he got my feet off the gang-plank on to American soil.  He needn’t have worried quite as much as that, for we had a lovely, exciting time visiting at the Gregorys’ up in Scotland while waiting for state-rooms.  And it was while hearing all those Scotchmen and Englishmen talk about statesmanship and jurisprudence and international law that I realized how America would need great brains later on, more and more, as she would have to arbitrate, maybe, for the whole world.

I smiled inwardly as I listened, for didn’t I know that in just a few years the nation would have Samuel Foster Crittenden to rely on?  Sam is a statesman by inheritance, for he has all sorts of remarkable Tennessee ancestry back of him from Colonial times down to his father’s father, who was one of the great generals of our own Civil War.  And as I listened to those splendid men talk about military matters, just as Judge Crittenden had talked to Sam and me about his father, the general, ever since we