road stone steps. She stands
watching him, and at the bottom he stops and again says:--

"Well--good-by--Jeanette--I must go--I suppose." And she does not
move, so again he says, "Good-by."

* * * * *

"Youth," said Colonel Martin Culpepper to the assembled company in the
ballroom of the Barclay home as the clock struck twelve and brought in
the twentieth century; "Youth," he repeated, as he tugged at the
bottom of Buchanan Culpepper's white silk vest, to be sure that it met
his own black trousers, and waved his free hand grandly aloft;
"Youth," he reiterated, as he looked over the gay young company at the
foot of the hall, while the fiddlers paused with their bows in the
air, and the din of the New Year's clang was rising in the town;
"Youth,--of all the things in God's good green earth,--Youth is the
most beautiful." Then he signalled with some dignity to the leader of
the orchestra, and the music began.

It was a memorable New Year's party that Jeanette Barclay gave at the
dawn of this century. The Barclay private car had brought a dozen girls
down from the state university for the Christmas holidays, and then had
made a recruiting trip as far east as Cleveland and had brought back a
score more of girls in their teens and early twenties--for an invitation
from the Barclays, if not of much social consequence, had a power behind
it that every father recognized. And what with threescore girls from the
Ridge, and young men from half a dozen neighbouring states,--and young
men are merely background in any social picture,--the ballroom was as
pretty as a garden. It was her own idea,--with perhaps a shade of
suggestion from her father,--that the old century should be danced out
and the new one danced in with the pioneers of Garrison County set in
quadrilles in the centre of the floor, while the young people whirled
around them in the two-step then in vogue. So the Barclays asked a score
or so of the old people in for dinner New Year's Eve; and they kept
below stairs until midnight. Then they filed into the ballroom, with its
fair fresh faces, its shrill treble note of merriment,--these old men
and women, gray and faded, looking back on the old century while the
others looked into the new one. There came Mr. and Mrs. Watts McHurdie
in the lead, Watts in his best brown suit, and Mrs. Watts in lavender to
sustain her gray hair; General Ward, in his straight black frock coat
and white tie, fol