insolvent.
As soon as he saw he could not pay his debts he stopped spending and
notified his creditors.

"I see nothing ahead of me," he wrote, "but greater ruin. I am like a
horse in a quicksand: every effort I make but sinks me deeper."

Some of his neighbors took the benefit of the bankrupt-law which was
passed to give relief. General Keith was urged to do likewise, but
he declined.

"Though I cannot pay my debts," he said, "the least I can do is to
acknowledge that I owe them. I am unwilling to appear, even for a short
time, to be denying what I know to be a fact."

He gave up everything that he owned, reserving nothing that would bring
in money.

When Elphinstone was sold, it brought less than the debts on it. The old
plate, with the Keith coat-of-arms on it, from which generations of
guests had been served, and which old Richard, the butler, had saved
during the war, went for its weight in silver. The library had been
pillaged until little of it remained. The old Keith pictures, some of
them by the best artists, which had been boxed and stored elsewhere
until after the war, now went to the purchaser of the place for less
than the price of their frames. Among them was the portrait of the man
in the steel coat and hat, who had the General's face.

What General Keith felt during this transition no one, perhaps, ever
knew; certainly his son did not know it, and did not dream of it until
later in life.

It was, however, not only in the South that fortunes were lost by the
war. As vast as was the increase of riches at the North among those who
stayed at home, it did not extend to those who took the field. Among
these was a young officer named Huntington, from Brookford, a little
town on the sunny slope that stretches eastwardly from the Alleghanies
to the Delaware. Captain Huntington, having entered the army on the
outbreak of the war, like Colonel Keith rose to the rank of general,
and, like General Keith, received a wound that incapacitated him for
service. His wife was a Southern woman, and had died abroad, just at the
close of the war, leaving him a little girl, who was the idol of his
heart. He was interested in the South, and came South to try and
recuperate from the effects of his wound and of exposure during the war.

The handsomest place in the neighborhood of Elphinstone was "Rosedale,"
the family-seat of the Berkeleys. Mr. Berkeley had been killed in the
war, and the plantation went, like Elphinsto