Charleston is a hard place to leave.  Wherever one may be going from there, the change is likely to be for the worse.  Nevertheless, it is impossible to stay forever; so at last you muster up your resignation and your resources, buy tickets, and reluctantly prepare to leave.  If you depart as we did, you go by rail, driving to the station in the venerable bus of the Charleston Transfer Company—­a conveyance which, one judges, may be coeval with the city’s oldest mansions.  Little as we wished to leave Charleston we did not wish to defer our departure through any such banality as the unnecessary missing of a train.  Therefore as we waited for the bus, on the night of leaving, and as train time drew nearer and nearer, with no sign of the lumbering old vehicle, we became somewhat concerned.

When the bus did come at last there was little time to spare; nevertheless the conductor, an easygoing man of great volubility, consumed some precious minutes in gossiping with the hotel porter, and then with arranging and rearranging the baggage on the roof of the bus.  His manner was that of an amateur bus conductor, trying a new experiment.  After watching his performances for a time, looking occasionally at my watch, by way of giving him a hint, I broke out into expostulation at the unnecessary delay.

“What’s the matter?” asked the man in a gentle, almost grieved tone.

“There’s very little time!” I returned.  “We don’t wish to miss the train.”

“Oh, all right,” said the bus conductor, making more haste, as though the information I had given him put a different face on matters generally.

Presently we started.  After a time he collected our fares.  I have forgotten whether the amount was twenty-five or fifty cents.  At all events, as he took the money from my hand he said to me reassuringly: 

“Don’t you worry, sir!  If I don’t get you to the train I’ll give you this money back.  That’s fair, ain’t it?”

CHAPTER XXXII

OUT OF THE PAST

By no means all the leading citizens of Atlanta were in a frame of mind to welcome General Sherman when, ten or a dozen years after the Civil War, he revisited the city.  Captain Evan P. Howell, a former Confederate officer, then publisher of the Atlanta “Constitution,” was, however, not one of the Atlantans who ignored the general’s visit.  Taking his young son, Clark, he called upon the general at the old Kimball House (later destroyed by fire), and had an interesting talk with him.  Clark Howell, who has since succeeded his father as publisher of the “Constitution,” was born while the latter was fighting at Chickamauga, and was consequently old enough, at the time of the call on Sherman, to remember much of what was said.  He heard the general tell Captain Howell why he had made such a point of taking Atlanta, and as Sherman’s military reasons for desiring possession of the Georgia city explain, to a large extent, Atlanta’s subsequent development, I shall quote them as Clark Howell gave them to me.