conferred upon Judge Green the great honor of asking his opinion upon an important question then before it. The learned Con way Robinson when once complimented upon a brief and his learning, responded : "Do you know Mr. William Green of Rich mond? He is a gentleman of truly wonder ful learning." In a description of La Fayette's visit to "Greenwood " the country seat of Judge John Green, Judge William Green's father, a writer has this to say of the famous toddy prepared for the General to drink, by Judge Green: "I do not think the practice of drinking then was more universal than it is now, but its effect upon the individual was different. Then it made you drunk, but it would not make you sick. Now it will in toxicate you, and also destroy your stomach. Then the whiskey was home-made, and with the pure essence of corn and rye. Now it has foreign ingredients in it, it is medicated in order to give it a better flavor and to make it sell, but the result is that it is death after a while, if the habit is persisted in. I have known a man to' be drunk every day for forty years off of old-time whiskey, and live to be eighty years old. Where is the man now who can drink this medicated whiskey so long and live?" I met Judge Green at the White Sulphur Springs a few years before he died. He was full of life and danced with the pleasure and vim of the youngest man there, taking all the steps he had learned in his youth, and wearing the dress of an old-time Vir ginia gentleman. His manners had all the courtesy of the days gone-by, and it was indeed a privilege and a pleasure to know him. He was small and fair, with blue eyes. He died Jan. 30, 1884, and is buried in beautiful Hollyhood Cemetery at Richmond. James Murray Mason was born Nov. 3, 1798, in Georgetown, D. C. He was the son of Gen. John Mason of Anacostan Island near Washington city, and the grandson of Col. George Mason, author of the Virginia
Bill of Rights and Constitution of Virginia of 1776, of whom Mr. Tucker said: "He stood in intellectual power the equal of the best and was rightly called " the master Mason." James M. Mason studied law at William and Mary College, read one winter with Benjamin Watkins Leigh, and began to practice in Winchester, Va., in 1820. He married Miss Eliza M. Chew, grand-daughter of Benjamin Chew, who was chief-justice of Pennsylvania in 1774, and afterwards judge and president of the high court of errors and appeals of Pennsylvania. "Cliveden," the old Chew homestead in Germantown, scarred with the battle-marks of the Revolution, is still in the possession of the family. Mr. Mason was a member of the Con stitutional Convention of Virginia of 1829 and 1830; was elected to Congress in 1837, where he served several terms. In 1847, while in Richmond under professional en gagements, he learned that his election to the United States Senate was contemplated. Unwilling to incur the suspicion of soliciting the honor, he immediately left the city with out waiting to complete the business that had called him there. The lawyer who told me this of Mr. Mason added, " It does not always happen now, that a person whose name is proposed for such an office gets out of the way; and the change in method has not invariably worked improvement." He served in the United States Senate from March 4, 1847 until April, 1861, and was for years chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. In September, 1861, he was sent with Mr. Slidell, as commissioner to England, that country having recognized the Confed erate states as belligerents. Mr. Mason car ried with him, to be presented as soon as their negotiations were completed, his com mission from President Jefferson Davis, as "Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Pleni potentiary " to the court of St. James. Escaping through the blockading squadron, they took passage at Havana on the British
