This is the record, the reference being to a marriage
service held at St. Paul's church in Richmond, in the late autumn of
1862: "An indefinable feeling of gloom was thrown over a most auspicious
event when the bride's youngest sister glided through a side door just
before the processional. Tottering to a chancel pew, she threw herself
upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs. Scarcely a year
before, the wedding march had been played for her, and a joyous throng
saw her wedded to gallant Breck Parkman. Before another twelvemonth
rolled around the groom was killed at the front."[2] Samuel Breck
Parkman was in the Harvard class following that to which I belonged.
Graduating in 1857, fifty-five years later I next saw his name in the
connection just given. It recorded an incident of not infrequent
occurrence in those dark and cruel days.
It was, however, in Breck Parkman and his like that I first became
conscious of certain phases of the South Carolina character which
subsequently I learned to bear in high respect.
So far as this University of South Carolina was concerned, it also so
chanced that, by the merest accident, I, a very young man, was thrown
into close personal relations with one of the most eminent of your
professors,--Francis Lieber. Few here, I suppose, now personally
remember Francis Lieber. To most it gives indeed a certain sense of
remoteness to meet one who, as in my case, once held close and even
intimate relations with a German emigrant, distinguished as a publicist,
who as a youth had lain, wounded and helpless, a Prussian recruit, on
the field above Namur.
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