hearing about the 'illiterate South.' _I_
say, let us have peace; my son's in love with a Southern girl! Why, at
Suez you'll see school-houses only five miles apart, from Wildcat
Ridge--where the niggers and mountaineers had that skirmish last
fall--clean down to Leggettstown! School-houses, why,"--the speaker
chuckled at what was coming--"one of 'em stands on the very spot where
in '65 I found a little freckled boy trying to poke a rabbit out of a
log with an old bayon----"

"No!" exclaimed the careworn listener, in one smile from his hat to his
handsome boots.

He would have said more, but the story-teller lifted a finger to
intimate that the bayonet was not the main point--there was better
laughing ahead. "Handsome little chap he was--brave eyes--sweet mouth.
Thinks I right there, 'This's going to be somebody some day.' He
reminded me of my own son at home. Well, he clum up behind my saddle and
rode with me to the edge of Suez, where we met his father with a team of
mules and a wagon of provisions. Talk about the Old South, I'll say
this: I _never_ see so fine a gentlemen look so _techingly_ poor. Hold
up, let me--now, let me--just wait till I tell you. That little rat--if
it hadn't been for that little barefooted rat with his scalp-lock
a-stickin' up through a tear in his hat, most likely you'd never so much
as heard--of Suez! For that little chap was John March!"

The speaker clapped his hands upon his knees, opened his mouth, and
waited for his hearer's laughter and wonder; but the hearer merely
smiled, and with a queer look of frolic in the depths of his handsome
eyes, asked,

"How lately were you in Suez?"

"Me? O--not since '65; but my son's a commercial tourist--rattling smart
fellow--you've probably met him--I never see anybody that hadn't--last
year he was in New England--this year he's tryin' Dixie. He sells this
celebrated 'Hoptonica' for the great Cincinnati house of Pretzels &
Bier. Funny thing--he's been mistaken for John March. A young
lady--Southern girl--up in New England about a year ago--it was just for
an instant--O of course--Must you go? Well, look here! Try to stop over
a day in Suez--That's right; it'll pay you!"

The two travelers parted. The Union veteran went on westward, while the
other--March by name--John March--was ticketed, of course, for Suez.

Some ten days before, in London, having just ended a four weeks' circuit
through a region of the Continent where news of Suez was eve