interpreter in the person of General David H. Strother, so agreeably
known to the public as "Porte Crayon," whose father was lessee of the
Springs, and who at one period himself conducted the hotel. He
addicts himself now to pen and pencil solely. In the village, where
he presides over a pretty cottage home, he has quite a circle of
idolaters: the neighbors' houses display on their walls his sketches
of the village eccentrics, attended by those accessories of dog or gun
or nag which always stamp the likeness, and make the rustic critic cry
out, "Them's his very features!" A large, boisterous painting in the
hotel represents his impressions of the village arena in his youth;
and ancient gamesters, gray-headed now, like to stroll in and
contemplate their own portraits grouped around the cock-pit in all
the hot blood of betting days and in the green dress-coats of 1840.
Strother (now an active graybeard) was profoundly stirred by
the outbreak of the rebellion. His friends were slaveholders and
Confederates: he lived upon the mountain-line dividing the rich,
proud, noble rebels of the eastern counties from the hungry and
jealous loyalists of West Virginia. He himself loved the State as
Bruce loved Scotland, but he loved country better. He shut himself
up with his distracting problem for three days in utter privacy: he
emerged with his mind made up, a Union soldier.

"It must have been awkward for a Virginian to cast his lot against
Virginia," we observed to the stagedriver who bore us back to the
station--an ex-Federal soldier and a faithful devotee of Crayon's.

"No awkwarder than for Virginia to go against her country: that's how
_we_ looked at it," retorted the patriot.

Bidding adieu to Berkeley and its paternal landlord, we resume the