h of a section. Miss Sally rose and shut down the
piano. Then leaning over it on her elbows, her rounded little chin
slightly elevated with languid impertinence, and one saucy foot kicked
backwards beyond the hem of her white cotton frock, she said: "And let
me tell you, Mister Chester Brooks, that it's just such God-forsaken,
infant phenomenons as you who want to run the whole country that make
all this fuss, when you ain't no more fit to be trusted with matches
than Judy's children. What do YOU know of Mr. Jo Corbin, when you don't
even know that he's from Shelbyville, and as good a Suth'ner as you, and
if he hasn't got niggers it's because they don't use them in his parts?
Yo'r for all the world like one o' Mrs. Johnson's fancy bantams that
ain't quit of the shell afore they square off at their own mother. My
goodness! Sho! Sho-o-o!" And suiting the action to the word the young
lady, still indolently, even in her simulation, swirled around, caught
her skirts at the side with each hand, and lazily shaking them before
her in the accepted feminine method of frightening chickens as she
retreated backwards, dropped them suddenly in a profound curtsey and
swept out of the parlor.

Nevertheless, as she entered the sitting-room she paused to listen,
then, going to the window, peeped through the slits of the Venetian
blind and saw her youthful admirer, more dejected in the consciousness
of his wasted efforts and useless attire, mount his showy young horse,
as aimlessly spirited as himself, and ride away. Miss Sally did not
regret this; neither had she been entirely sincere in her defense of her
mysterious correspondent. But, like many of her sex, she was trying to
keep up by the active stimulus of opposition an interest that she had
begun to think if left to itself might wane. She was conscious that
her cousin Julia, although impertinent and illogical, was right in
considering her first epistolary advances to Corbin as a youthful
convert's religious zeal. But now that her girlish enthusiasm was spent,
and the revival itself had proved as fleeting an excitement as the old
"Tournament of Love and Beauty," which it had supplanted, she preferred
to believe that she enjoyed the fascinating impropriety because it was
the actual result of her religious freedom. Perhaps she had a vague idea
that Corbin's conversion would expiate her present preference for dress
and dancing. She had certainly never flirted with him; they had never
exc