to the public grammar and high
schools. Garnet mentioned Montrose boastfully more than once.

"Why don't we go there?" asked one of the projectors, innocently.

"Oh--ah--wha'd you say, Colonel Proudfit? Yess, that's so, we pass right
by it on ow way to Rosemont"--and they did, to the sweet satisfaction of
the Misses Kinsington, who were resolved no railroad should come to Suez
if they could prevent it.

At Rosemont Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew told each Northerner, as soon as he
could get him from Mrs. Garnet's presence, that Virginia was the Mother
of Presidents; that the first slaves ever brought to this country came
in Yankee ships; that Northern envy of Southern opulence and refinement
had been the mainspring of the abolition movement; and--with a smile of
almost womanly heroism--that he--or his father at least--had lost all
his slaves in the war.

At Widewood, whither Garnet and Ravenel led, the travelers saw only
Judge March and the scenery. He brought them water to the fence in a
piggin, and with a wavering hand served it out in a gourd.

"I could 'a' served it in a glass, gentlemen, but we Southe'ne's think
it's sweeteh drank fum a gode."

"We met your son at the cotillion," said one, and the father lighted up
with such confident expectation of a compliment that the stranger added,
cordially, "He's quite noted," though he had not heard of the affair
with Leggett.

On the way back Garnet praised everything and everybody. He wished they
could have seen Daphne Dalrymple! If it were not for the Northern
prejudice against Southern writers, her poems would--"See that fox--ah!
he's hid, now."

But the wariest game was less coy than the poetess. She wrote, that day,

"O! hide me from the Northron's eye!
Let me not hear his fawning voice,
I heard the Southland matron sigh
And saw the piteous tear that" ...

Thus it ended; "as if," said Garnet to John, who with restrained pride
showed him the manuscript, "as if grief for the past choked
utterance--for the present. There's a wonderful eloquence in that
silence, March, tell her to leave it as it is; dry so."

John would have done this had he not become extremely preoccupied. The
affair at the old bridge was everybody's burning secret till the
prospectors were gone. But the day after they left it was everybody's
blazing news. Oddly enough, not what anybody had done, but what Leggett
had said--in contempt of the color line--was the microscopic germ o