trip Page called—­self-invited—­upon Jefferson Davis and was cordially received.  At Atlanta, as he records above, he made friends with that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing.  The name of this sympathetic acquaintance was Woodrow Wilson.

[Illustration:  Walter H. Page in 1876, when he was a Fellow of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.]

[Illustration:  Basil L. Gildersleeve, Professor of Greek, Johns Hopkins University, 1876-1915]

Another important event had taken place, for, at St. Louis, on November 15, 1880, Page had married Miss Willia Alice Wilson.  Miss Wilson was the daughter of a Scotch physician, Dr. William Wilson, who had settled in Michigan, near Detroit, in 1832.  When she was a small child she went with her sister’s family—­her father had died seven years before—­to North Carolina, near Cary; and she and Page had been childhood friends and schoolmates.  At the time of the wedding, Page was editor of the St. Joseph Gazette; the fact that he had attained this position, five months after starting at the bottom, sufficiently discloses his aptitude for journalistic work.

Page had now outgrown any Southern particularism with which he may have started life.  He no longer found his country exclusively in the area south of the Potomac; he had made his own the West, the North—­New York, Chicago, Denver, as well as Atlanta and Raleigh.  It is worth while insisting on this fact, for the cultivation of a wide-sweeping Americanism and a profound faith in democracy became the qualities that will loom most largely in his career from this time forward.  It is necessary only to read the newspaper letters which he wrote on his Southern trip in 1881 to understand how early his mind seized this new point of view.  Many things which now fell under his observant eye in the Southern States greatly irritated him and with his characteristic impulsiveness he pictured these traits in pungent phrase.  The atmosphere of shiftlessness that too generally prevailed in some localities; the gangs of tobacco-chewing loafers assembled around railway stations; the listless Negroes that seemed to overhang the whole country like a black cloud; the plantation mansions in a sad state of disrepair; the old unoccupied slave huts overgrown with weeds; the unpainted and broken-down fences; the rich soil that was crudely and wastefully cultivated with a single crop—­the youthful social philosopher found himself comparing these vestigia of a half-moribund civilization with the vibrant cities of the North, the beautiful white and green villages of New England, and the fertile prairie farms of the West.  “Even the dogs,”