was not until then that I found my hand still holding my watch at the opening of its pocket, where, in my excitement, I had forgotten to deposit it.  I looked, and I had been standing unmoved in the same position and intently listening for three hours and fifteen minutes.  Near me stood one old as myself—­a friend, a neighbor, and a minister of the gospel; he was livid with excitement, and his lips trembled as he said to me:  ’Will you ever doubt again that God inspires man?’”

Notwithstanding the immense Democratic majority in the State, the Whigs determined to run Prentiss for Congress:  the election, at that time, was by general ticket, and there were two members to be elected:  the Whig nomination was Prentiss and Wood; the Democratic, Claiborne and Gholson.

Claiborne was a native of the State, and the son of General Ferdinand Claiborne, a young man of very superior abilities, and at the time a member of Congress.  McNutt was the Democratic candidate for Governor.  The campaign was a most animated one, and Prentiss addressed the people in very nearly every county in the State; the people, en masse, flocked to hear him, and his name was in every mouth.  The Democratic nominees did not attempt to meet him on the stump.  His march through the State was over the heads of the people, hundreds following him from county to county in his ovation.  McNutt alone attempted to meet him and speak with him, and he only once.  McNutt was a Virginian, and was a man of stupendous abilities; he was a lawyer by profession, and was Governor of the State.  Next to Poindexter, he was the ablest man who ever filled the chair.  Unfortunately, like most of the young and talented of that day in the West, he was too much addicted to the intoxicating bowl.  Upon the only meeting of these, Prentiss and McNutt, the latter, in his speech, urged as a reason for the rejection or defeat of the former his dissipated habits, admitted his great abilities, his masterly genius, pronounced him the first man of the age intellectually, but deplored his habits, which were rendering him useless, with all his genius, learning, and eloquence.

Prentiss, in reply, said:  “My fellow-citizens, you have heard the charge against my morals, sagely, and, I had almost said, soberly made by the gentleman, the Democratic nominee for the chief executive office of this State:  had I said this, it would have been what the lawyers term a misnomer.  It would be impossible for him to do or say anything soberly, for he has been drunk ten years; not yesterday, or last week, in a frolic, or, socially, with the good fellows, his friends, at the genial and generous board—­but at home, and by himself and demijohn; not upon the rich wines of the Rhine or the Rhone, the Saone or the Guadalquivir; not with high-spirited or high-witted men, whose souls, when mellowed with glorious wine, leap from their lips sublimated in words swollen with wit, or thought brilliant and dazzling as the blood