When the War ended many men who had gone into the Confederate army at sixteen or seventeen years of age came to Charlottesville to complete their education.  The hard life of the army had made some of these into a wild lot, and there was a great deal of gambling and drinking during their time, and also after it, for several succeeding generations of students looked up to the ex-soldiers as heroes, and carried on the unfortunate traditions left by them at the university.  In the nineties, however, a change came, and though there is still some drinking and gambling, it is doubtful whether such vices are now more prevalent at the University of Virginia than at many other colleges.  The honor system has never been extended to cover these points.

It is related that, in Poe’s time, gambling became such a serious obstacle to discipline and work that the university authorities set the town marshal after a score or so of gambling students, Poe among them, whereupon these students fled to the Ragged Mountains, near by, and remained for two weeks, during which time Poe is said to have mightily entertained them with stories and prophecies, including a forecast of the Civil War, in which, he declared, two of the youths present would fight on opposite sides.

The Poe tradition is kept vigorously alive at the university.  Not long ago a member of the Raven Society, one of the rather too numerous student organizations, discovered the burial place of Poe’s mother, who was an actress, and who died penniless in Richmond at the age of twenty-four and was buried with the destitute.  By a happy inspiration a fund was raised among the students for the erection of a monument to her—­an example of fine and chivalrous sentiment on the part of these young men, which, one feels, is somehow delicately intertwined with the traditions of the honor system.

The Poe professor of English at the university, when we were there, was Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, who has since taken the professorship of English at the United States Naval Academy.  By a coincidence which has proved a happy one for those who love the stories of the late Sidney Porter (O.  Henry), Dr. Smith grew up as a boy with Porter, in Greensboro, North Carolina.  Because of this, and also because of Dr. Smith’s own gifts as a writer and an analyst, it is peculiarly fitting that he should have undertaken the work which has occupied him for several years past, the result of which has recently been given to us in the form “The O. Henry Biography.”

Dr. Smith was Roosevelt exchange professor at the University of Berlin in 1910-11, holding the chair of American History and Institutions.  While occupying that professorship he met the Kaiser.

“I talked with him twice,” he said, “and upon the second occasion under very delightful circumstances, for I was invited to dinner at the Palace at Potsdam, and was the only guest, the Kaiser, Kaiserin, and Princess Victoria Luise being present.