Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 4).djvu/41

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VIRGINIA CAMPAIGN
37

"a very Iroquois," according to Walpole. Yet certain of his friends denied the brutality which many attributed to him. "As we were walking in the Park," one of Braddock's admirers has recorded, "we heard a poor fellow was to be chastized; when I requested the General to beg off the offender. Upon his application to the general officer, whose name was Dury, he asked Braddock, How long since he had divested himself of brutality and the insolence of his manner? To which the other replied, 'You never knew me insolent to my inferiors. It is only to such rude men as yourself that I behave with the spirit which I think they deserve.'"[1] And yet, when his sister Fanny hanged herself with a silver girdle to her chamber door, after losing her fortune at the gaming tables, the brute of a brother observed, "I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up." On the other hand it need not be forgotten that Braddock was for forty-three years in the service of the famed Coldstream Guards; that he

  1. Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, vol. iii., p. 55.