Mrs. Wesley frequently embarrasses me by remarking
in the presence of other persons—our intimate
friends, of course—“Wesley, you are
not brilliant, but you are good.”
From Mrs. Wesley’s outlook, which is that of
a very high ideal, there is nothing uncomplimentary
in the remark, nothing so intended, but I must confess
that I have sometimes felt as if I were paying a rather
large price for character. Yet when I reflect
on my cousin the colonel, and my own action in the
matter, I am ready with gratitude to accept Mrs. Wesley’s
estimate of me, for if I am not good, I am not anything.
Perhaps it is an instance of my lack of brilliancy
that I am willing to relate certain facts which strongly
tend to substantiate this. My purpose, however,
is not to prove either my goodness or my dulness, but
to leave some record, even if slight and imperfect,
of my only relative. When a family is reduced
like ours to a single relative, it is well to make
the most of him. One should celebrate him annually,
as it were.
One morning in the latter part of May, a few weeks
after the close of the war of the rebellion, as I
was hurrying down Sixth Avenue in pursuit of a heedless
horse-car, I ran against a young person whose shabbiness
of aspect was all that impressed itself upon me in
the instant of collision. At a second glance
I saw that this person was clad in the uniform of
a Confederate soldier—an officer’s
uniform originally, for there were signs that certain
insignia of rank had been removed from the cuffs and
collar of the threadbare coat. He wore a wide-brimmed
felt hat of a military fashion, decorated with a tarnished
gilt cord, the two ends of which, terminating in acorns,
hung down over his nose. His butternut trousers
were tucked into the tops of a pair of high cavalry
boots, of such primitive workmanship as to suggest
the possibility that the wearer had made them himself.
In fact, his whole appearance had an impromptu air
about it. The young man eyed me gloomily for half
a minute; then a light came into his countenance.
“Wesley—Tom Wesley!” he exclaimed.
“Dear old boy!”
To be sure I was Thomas Wesley, and, under conceivable
circumstances, dear old boy; but who on earth was
he?
“You don’t know me?” he said, laying
a hand on each of my shoulders, and leaning back as
he contemplated me with a large smile in anticipatory
enjoyment of my surprise and pleasure when I should
come to know him. “I am George W. Flagg,
and long may I wave!”
My cousin Flagg! It was no wonder that I did
not recognize him.
