feeling for me. At one time he voluntarily offered to secure for me a situation in one of the banks in Staunton if I would consent to accept it. On another, after he had been installed Secretary of the Interior at the National Capital, and was, in company with President Fillmore and the late W. W. Corcoran, on a visit to the parade grounds of the Virginia Military Institute at Lexington, he called me to him and offered me a clerkship in his department at a salary of twelve hundred dollars per year. Both propositions I gratefully declined and subsequently regretted.

I deem it due to the memory of Mr. Stuart thus to refer to his magnanimous conduct, for he could not reasonably have hoped for reward. He, no doubt, regarded me as a youth battling with the affairs of business life, and to some extent friendless, and my close attention to my business, and the manner of its accomplishment, prompted him, I think, to determine to try to help me. He almost invariably attended the Circuit Court of Rockbridge and occasionally the County Court, and it was thus I made his acquaintance, and won his esteem. His memory I shall ever cherish with feelings of gratitude. Of his ability as a lawyer and as a statesman abler pens than mine will write. I knew him in the heyday of his glory, and when he was at his best. He was always so pleasant and affable that it was a pleasure to transact business with him. Since 1854, I have rarely had the pleasure of meeting with him.

In June of last year, meeting here with a mutual friend from Staunton, I handed him on his leaving for his home a box of cigars and asked him to hand it to Mr. Stuart for me, and to say that it was sent as a token of kind recollections of former days. That little act of kindness drew from him a letter to me, a copy of which I attach hereto. Public men do acts of kindness that the world at large knows nothing of, they are too often blamed unjustly for failing to do such things. This letter is written in kind remembrance of a great and a good man.

Very respectfully,

Rowland D. Buford.