d
uniform. If he had a peg-leg or an empty sleeve, so much the more
impudently could he pass around his property cap. For forty years, he
and his mendicant band have been a cursed albatross hung around the
necks of their honest fellows. Able-bodied men, they have lolled back
and eaten up millions of dollars, belonging to a State which they
pretend to love and which, as they well know, has needed every penny for
the desperate struggle of existence. Since the political party which
dominates this State is too cowardly to tell them to go to work or go to
the devil, it will be a God's mercy when the last one of them is in his
grave. You may take my word for that."

But Queed, being a scientist by passion, never took anybody's word for
anything. He always went to the original sources of information, and
found out for himself. It was a year now since he had begun saturating
himself in the annals of the State and the South, and he had scoured the
field so effectually that Colonel Cowles himself had been known to
appeal to him on a point of history, though the Colonel had forty years'
start on him, and had himself helped to make that history.

Therefore Queed knew that Nicolovius, by taking the case of one soldier
in ten, perhaps, or twenty or fifty, and offering it as typical of the
whole, was bitterly caricaturing history; and he wondered why in the
world the old man cared to do it.

"My own reading of the recent history of the South," said Queed, "can
hardly sustain such a view."

"You have only to read further to be convinced."

"But I thought you yourself never read recent history."

Nicolovius flung him a sharp look, which the young man, staring
thoughtfully at the floor, missed. The old professor laughed.

"My dear boy! I read it on the lips of Major Brooke, I read it daily in
the newspapers, I read it in such articles as your Colonel Cowles wrote
about this very Reunion. I cannot get away from history in the making,
if I would. Ah, there is the supper bell--I'm quite ready for it, too.
Let us go down."

They went down arm in arm. On the stairs Nicolovius said: "These
Southern manifestations interest me because, though extreme, they are
after all so absurdly typical of human nature. I have even seen the same
sort of thing in my own land."

Queed, though he knew the history of Ireland very well, could not recall
any parallel to the United Confederate Veterans in the annals of that
country. Still, a man capable o