I shall always remember the delightful experience of awakening in that room, so vast, dignified, and beautiful, and of lying there a little drowsy, and thinking of those who had been there before me.  This was the room occupied by George and Martha Washington when they stopped for a few days at Chatham on their wedding journey; this was the room occupied by Madison, by Monroe, by Washington Irving, and by Robert E. Lee when he visited Chatham and courted Mary Custis, who became his wife.  And, most wonderful of all to me, this was the room occupied by Lincoln when he came to Fredericksburg to review the army, while Chatham was Union headquarters, and the embattled Lee had headquarters in the old house known as Brompton, still standing on Marye’s Heights back of the river and the town.  It is said that Lee during the siege of Fredericksburg never trained his guns on Chatham, because of his sentiment for the place.  As I lay there in the morning I wondered if Lee had been aware, at the time, that Lincoln was under the roof of Chatham, and whether Lincoln knew, when he slept in “my” room, that Washington and Lee had both been there before him.

War, I thought, not only makes strange bedfellows, but strange combinations in the histories of bedrooms.

Then the maid rapped for the second time upon my door, and though this time I got up at once, my ruminations made me scandalously late for breakfast.

After breakfast came the motor, which was to take us to the battlefields, its driver a thin dry-looking, dry-talking man, with the air of one a little tired of the story he told to tourists day in and day out, yet conscientiously resolved to go through with it.  Before the huge cemetery which overlooks the site of the most violent fighting that occurred in the bloody and useless Battle of Fredericksburg, he paused briefly; then drove us to the field of Chancellorsville, to that of the Battles of the Wilderness, and finally to the region of Spottsylvania Courthouse; and at each important spot he stopped and told us what had happened there.  He knew all about the Civil War, that man, and he had a way of passing out his information with a calm assumption that his hearers knew nothing about it whatever.  This irritated my companion, who also knows all about the War, having once passed three days in the neighborhood of a Soldiers’ Home.  Consequently he kept cutting in, supplying additional details—­such, for instance, as that Stonewall Jackson, who died in a house which the driver pointed out, was shot by some of his own men, who took him for a Yankee as he was returning from a reconnaissance.

Either one of these competitive historians alone, I could have stood, but the way they picked each other up, fighting the old-time battles over again, got on my nerves.  Besides, it was cold, and as I have taken occasion to remark before, I do not like cold motor rides.  Indeed, as I think it over, it seems to me I do not like battlefields, either.  At all events, I became more and more morose as we traversed that bleak Virginia landscape, and I am afraid that before the day was over I was downright sulky.