Carola, at this point, in her most formidable
voice. "What's that stuff you're reading, Augustus?"

I shook in my shoes. "Why, Aunt, it's John--"

"Not another word, sir! And never let me hear his name again. To
think--to think--" But here Aunt Carola's face grew extremely red, and
she choked so decidedly that Uncle Andrew poured her a glass of water.

The rest of our luncheon was conducted with remarkable solemnity.

As we were rising from table, my Aunt said:--

"It was high time, Augustus, that you came home. You seem to have got
into very strange company down there."

This was the last reference to the Bombos that my Aunt ever made in my
hearing. Of course it is preposterous to suppose that she traces her
descent from a king through a mere bowl of punch, and her being still
the president of the Selected Salic Scions is proof irrefutable that her
claim rests upon a more solid foundation.

XXIV: Post Scriptum

I think that John Mayrant, Jr., is going to look like his mother. I was
very glad to be present when he was christened, and at this ceremony I
did not feel as I had felt the year before at the wedding; for then I
had known well enough that if the old ladies found any blemish on
that occasion, it was my being there! To them I must remain forever a
"Yankee," a wall perfectly imaginary and perfectly real between us; and
the fact that young John could take any other view of me, was to them a
sign of that "radical" tendency in him which they were able to forgive
solely because he was of the younger generation and didn't know any
better.

And with these thoughts in my mind, and remembering a certain very grave
talk I had once held with Eliza in the Exchange about the North and the
South, in which it was my good fortune to make her see that there is on
our soil nowadays such a being as an American, who feels, wherever
he goes in our native land, that it is all his, and that he belongs
everywhere to it, I looked at the little John Mayrant, and then I said
to his mother:--

"And will you teach him 'Dixie' and 'Yankee Doodle' as well?"

But Eliza smiled at me with friendly, inscrutable eyes.

"Oh," said John, "you mustn't ask too much of the ladies. I'll see to
all that."

Perhaps he will. And an education at Harvard College need not cause
the boy to forget his race, or his name, or his traditions, but only to
value them more, as they should be valued. And the way that they should
be valued is this: