If I am not hung,
I will go to Canada; meanwhile, I smoke my cigar, colonel."
And Mr. X----- lazily threw away his stump, and lit a fresh Havana. It
is impossible to imagine any thing more careless than his attitude.
This man was either very brave or frightfully apathetic.
Five minutes afterward, I knew that any thing but apathy possessed him.
All at once he rose in his chair, and his eyes were fixed upon me with
a glance so piercing and melancholy, that they dwell still in my
memory, and will always dwell there.
"I said we were playing a comedy here in Richmond, colonel," he said,
in tones so deep and solemn that they made me start; "I am playing my
part with the rest; I play it in public, and even in private, as before
you to-night. I sit here, indolently smoking and uttering my jests and
platitudes, and, at the moment that I am speaking, my heart is
breaking! I am a Virginian--I love this soil more than all the rest of
the world--not a foot but is dear and sacred, and a vulgar horde are
about to trample it under foot, and enslave its people. Every pulse of
my being throbs with agony at the thought! I can not sleep. I have lost
all taste for food. One thought alone haunts me--that the land of
Washington, Jefferson, Mason, Henry, and Randolph, is to become the
helpless prey of the scum of Europe and the North! My family has lived
here for more than two hundred years.
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