in a reverie; he reads history as recorded and interpreted for him on monument and slab, on boulder and arch. But in the 'seventies the field had to be reconstructed in imagination, the contestants visualized, the lines of battle regrouped, the sound of gun and drum made audible again, the charge and countercharge reënacted. If the field is history now, it was the stuff that dreams are made of then, and to no one was its appeal stronger or more fertile in storied suggestion than to O. Henry. "I have never known any one who read history with such avidity," said Mrs. R. M. Hall, in whose home on the Texas ranch O. Henry lived. "He not only devoured Hume, Macaulay, Green, and Guizot, but made their scenes and characters live again in vivid conversation."

But though General Greene gave Greensboro its name, the real founder of the town was an old-field school teacher, one of those rare characters who, unknown to history, seem endowed with the power to vitalize every forward-looking agency of their times and to touch constructively every personality that comes within the orbit of their influence. The year 1824, which witnessed the marriage of Sidney Porter and Ruth Worth, O.Henry's grandparents, witnessed the death at the age of one hundred years of David Caldwell, the man who, more than any other, made Guilford County and Greensboro known beyond State lines.

It has been already said that when the battle of Guilford Court House was fought there was no Greensboro. There was, however, the triangle in which Greensboro was to be placed, a triangle formed by David Caldwell's log schoolhouse and his two Presbyterian churches, Alamance and Buffalo. The schoolhouse, which was also his home, stood on the road between Guilford Court House and what was to be Greensboro. To it came students from every Southern State and from it went five governors, more than fifty ministers, and an uncounted number of teachers and trained citizens. David Caldwell was a Scotch-Irishman from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Princeton, a teacher, preacher, carpenter, farmer, doctor, and patriot.

David Caldwell had espoused the cause of the Revolution ten years before the storm broke and from his schoolroom and pulpit had prepared his countrymen for the issue which he plainly foresaw. He had reasoned with Tryon and Cornwallis and had given valuable counsel to Greene. Though a price had been set upon his head he was with his two congregations when they faced the British at Alamance and Guilford Court House. The greatest personal loss that had come to him was in the wanton burning of his books, letters, and private papers. Armful after armful of these memorials of an heroic past were dumped by Cornwallis's troopers into

the flaming oven in the doctor's backyard. Though his books were his tools, he was often heard to say that he regretted most of all the loss of his private papers which constituted a sort of first-hand history of the times. Had these been preserved Doctor Caldwell's name would probably appear in every record of the original sources of colonial and Revolutionary history, while now it appears in none.

His life was written eighteen years after his death by Dr. Eli W. Caruthers, and he appears as one of the characters in at least two historical novels, "Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment," written by Dr. Calvin H. Wiley, in 1847, and "The Master of the Red Buck and the Bay Doe," a recent work by Mr. William Laurie Hill. Doctor Wiley's book is mentioned by Mr. William Dean Howells as having "bewitched" him in his boyhood:*

At nine years of age he [Mr. Howells] read the history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who read novels, and a novel was like "Handy Andy," or "Harry Lorrequer," or the "Bride of Lammermoor.' His brother had another novel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper's old "Library of Select Novels," and was called "Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment," and it was about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. It be*See "A Boy's Town," pages 21-22.

witched them, and though my boy could not afterward recall a single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind's eye every trait of its outward aspect.

But David Caldwell lives most securely not in books but in the men that he made and in the widening compass of their influence. The Guilford County of his day was peculiarly cosmopolitan and even international in its make-up. There were the Scotch-Irish in and around Greensboro, then as now the masterful stock; there were the German exiles from the Palatinate in the eastern part of the county; and there were the English Quakers, who came via Nantucket, and a little band of Welshmen to the west and south. Out of the clash or coincidence of these varied racial stocks the history of the county was builded. But all elements went to school to David Caldwell or to teachers trained by him.

The Worth and Porter families form no exception. Jonathan Worth, Quaker and future governor, came from Center to Greensboro to be taught and to teach in the Greensboro Academy, a Presbyterian school taught by a pupil and son of David Caldwell. In 1821 "the trustees of the Academy think it necessary to announce to the public that they have employed Mr. Jonathan Worth as an assistant teacher. No young gentleman, we believe, sustains a fairer character than Mr. Worth." When Jonathan Worth began

the study of law it was under Archibald D. Murphey, another graduate of David Caldwell's log school. For fifty years after his death the educational currents flowing through the county can be traced back to a common source in David Caldwell.

But the channel through which he was chiefly to exert an influence upon the Porter family was Governor John Motley Morehead, the founder of Edgeworth Female Seminary. Edgeworth, as we have seen, played an important rôle in the lives of O. Henry's parents, but after the buildings were burned the spacious lawn was to serve in a peculiar way as playground and dreamland for the son. Mr. Morehead attended David Caldwell's school when the old dominie had passed his ninetieth year but when his ability as a teacher and his range of vision as a citizen seemed to have suffered no diminution. Governor Morehead was an admirer and close reader of the novels of Maria Edgeworth and of her earlier "Essays on Practical Education," written in collaboration with her father.

Miss Edgeworth's favourite contrast between the social careers of young women who had been sanely educated at home and those who had not, her constant balancing of the simple affections against false sentiment and sentimentality, her pitting of the "dasher" and "title-hunter" against modesty and native worth appealed strongly to a man who had five daughters to