hing once with
us."

"The same thing--in the North?" His tone still held me off.

"The same sort of dear old people--I mean charming, peppery, refined,
courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that
has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game." And, as certain
beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: "If you
knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would
warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of
Kings Port."

"But politics?" the young Southerner slowly suggested.

"Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!" I exclaimed. "Of course, we had a
family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew
each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept
up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation
to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their
fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke
and Rip Van Winkle! It's all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a
small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness.
There's nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil
and discontent. We're no longer a small people living and dying for a
great idea; we're a big people living and dying for money. And these
ladies of yours--well, they have made me homesick for a national and
a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They're
like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet
clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight
we all once talked and danced in--sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning
inside glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of
a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright
silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a
square piano, singing Moore's melodies--and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore
Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!"

John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. "Yes, that's it;
that's all it," he mused. "You do understand."

But I had to finish my flight. "Such quiet faces are gone now in the
breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing
trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of
their competing wives--while yours have lingered on, spared by your very
adversity