Stranica 546 [546]
OCR
ER Boe A ee Ge Bia ROG EÁ ÉSA —_ —————————— e —— ———— ——— = = = Se ee = Ss Gettysburg. Under a very large black walnut tree General Jackson had his headquarters in the fall of 1862, and here his meals were brought to him by a son of Carter Hall, who still remembers seeing the General seated at a pine table reading his Bible. He also remembers the gallant Stuart as he dashed up and dismounted for a consultation with his senior officer. General Jackson had declined an invitation to make his headquarters in the house at Carter Hall upon the ground that the tramp of soldiers’ boots and the constant arrival and departure of couriers would disturb the ladies. And it was in a room that looks out on these old trees that there had died many years earlier—in 1813—a friend of Colonel Burwell’s, Edmund Randolph, Aide-de-Camp to General Washington, and later Governor of Virginia, first Attorney-General of the United States and Secretary of State. To the southeast of the house lies another little wood, left perched upon that bluff from the foot of which the great spring oushes; these trees, except for the scythe of Time, are as they have been for longer than the short century and a quarter since the house was built. It is in another part of this same bluff that there is a cave about which many legends cluster, as they do about the whole place. But there is only space to mention the fact that this cave is the real home of the ghost. Unlike most ghosts, this one has a scientific reason for being. Often enough, even to this day, a coach may be heard to rumble up to the portico of the house and the old-fashioned folding steps may be heard bumping down as they are unfolded. It is, of course, very probable that the cave extends under the house and on to the west until it passes beneath the highway. Certain it is, that the road sounds queerly hollow at a certain point, and the unbelieving maintain that the sound of the coach is only that of a truck or a wagon passing over "the hollow place" in the highroad, and that the sound is carried by the cave to the earth under the house a quarter of a mile away. [335]
