the breaking of those bonds of sympathy which had held the
twenty-one thousand inhabitants of Dinwiddie, as they had held the
entire South, solidly knit together in a passive yet effectual
resistance to the spirit of change. Of the world beyond the borders of
Virginia, Dinwiddians knew merely that it was either Yankee or foreign,
and therefore to be pitied or condemned according to the Evangelical or
the Calvinistic convictions of the observer. Philosophy, they regarded
with the distrust of a people whose notable achievements have not been
in the direction of the contemplative virtues; and having lived
comfortably and created a civilization without the aid of science, they
could afford not unreasonably to despise it. It was a quarter of a
century since "The Origin of Species" had changed the course of the
world's thought, yet it had never reached them. To be sure, there was an
old gentleman in Tabb Street whose title, "the professor," had been
conferred in public recognition of peaceful pursuits; but since he never
went to church, his learning was chiefly effective when used to point a
moral from the pulpit. There was, also, a tradition that General Goode
had been seen reading Plato before the Battle of Seven Pines; and this
picturesque incident had contributed the distinction of the scholar to
the more effulgent glory of the soldier. But for purely abstract
thought--for the thought that did not construct an heroic attitude or a
concrete image--there was as little room in the newer industrial system
as there had been in the aristocratic society which preceded it. The
world still clung to the belief that the business of humanity was
confined to the preservation of the institutions which existed in the
present moment of history--and Dinwiddie was only a quiet backwater into
which opinions, like fashions, were borne on the current of some
tributary stream of thought. Human nature in this town of twenty-one
thousand inhabitants differed from human nature in London or in the
Desert of Sahara mainly in the things that it ate and the manner in
which it carried its clothes. The same passions stirred its heart, the
same instincts moved its body, the same contentment with things as they
are, and the same terror of things as they might be, warped its mind.

The canary fluted on, and from beyond the mulberry trees there floated
the droning voice of an aged negress, in tatters and a red bandanna
turban, who persuasively offered straw