Upon the collapse of the Express Dr. Bagby went to Washington as correspondent for a number of papers, and while there attained distinction as a humorist through the “Letters of Mozis Addums,” written for the Southern Literary Messenger, of Richmond.

His abiding place is of hazy uncertainty, one of his kinsmen saying—­“He didn’t live anywhere,” He might as well have dwelt in his own “Hobgoblinopolis.”  His wanderings had taught him the peculiar charm of the Virginia roads of that day, as evidenced by the aspiration of “Mozis Addums” when contemplating the limitations of his “Fifty Millions”: 

I want to give Virginia a perfect system of county roads, so that one may get off at a station and go to the nearest country-house without breaking his neck, and it would take five hundred millions to do that.

It may be, as the doctor laments, that “The old Virginia gentleman, All of the olden time,” has passed away, the colonial house is modernized, and the ghost, the killing of whom would be “an enormity far greater than the crime of killing a live man,” has been laid to rest for half a century, but the old scenes and the old-time life come back to us who once knew it, in the pages of the perennial boy who recalls the time when “me and Billy Ivins and the other fellows set forth with six pine poles and a cymling full of the best and biggest fishing worms,” to fish in the Appomattox where it “curves around the foot of Uncle Jim’s plantation,” and where there is a patriarchal beech with a tangle of roots whereon the Randolphs of historic note were wont to repose in the days long gone.  This fishing party is under the fair October skies when “the morn, like an Eastern queen, is sumptuously clad in blue and gold; the sheen of her robes in dazzling sunlight, and she comes from her tent of glistening, silken, celestial warp, beaming with tender smiles.”  “It is a day of days for flatback, provided the moon is right.”  But “Billy Ivins swears that the planetary bodies have nothing to do with fish—­it’s all confounded superstition.”  So they cast in their hooks, “Sutherland’s best,” and talk about Harper’s Ferry and “old Brown” until one of the party “thinks he has a nibble” and begs for silence, which at once supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the balance.  When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun, after the manner of a newspaper man, and “Billy Ivins swears he will kill him for a fool.”

Oh, there were great old times on the Appomattox in the olden days, before its waves had turned battle-red and flashed that savage tint along the river-bank for all coming time.

[Illustration:  “AVENEL” The home of the Burwells, where Dr. Bagby spent many happy days]

A part of the conversation shows us that this fishing expedition took place in the autumn of 1859, not a year before Dr. Bagby was called to the post of editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, taking the place of the poet, John R. Thompson, who was sent to England to lead the forlorn hope of a magazine to represent the Southern cause in London.  A banquet was given at Zetelle’s restaurant as a farewell to Mr. Thompson and welcome to Dr. Bagby.