of
the blind old man.

"Did you not bring my daughter with you?" asked Mr. Villars.

"Your daughter is here, sir;" and he of the handsome whiskers gave
Virginia a most captivating bow and smile.

"He means my sister," said Virginia. "She has gone out, and we are
feeling somewhat anxious about her." She thought it best to say thus
much, in order that, should the visitor perceive any strangeness or
abstraction on her part, he might think it was caused by solicitude for
the absent Salina.

"Nothing can have happened to her, certainly," remarked Mr. Bythewood,
seating himself in an attitude of luxurious ease, approaching almost to
indolent recklessness. "We are the most chivalrous people in the world.
There is no people, I think, on the face of the globe, among whom the
innocent and defenceless are so perfectly secure."

Virginia thought of the hapless victim of the mob in the kitchen yonder,
and smiled politely.

"I have no very great fears for her safety," said the old man. "Yet I
have felt some anxiety to know the meaning of the noises I heard in the
direction of the academy, an hour ago."

Bythewood laughed, and stroked his glossy mustache.

"I don't know, sir. I reckon, however, that the Yankee schoolmaster has
been favored with a little demonstration of southern sentiment."

"How! not mobbed?"

"Call it what you please, sir," said Bythewood, with an air of
pleasantry. "I think our people have been roused at last; and if so,
they have probably given him a lesson he will never forget."

"What do you mean by 'our people'?" the old man gravely inquired.

"He means," said Virginia, with quiet but cutting irony, "the most
chivalrous people in the world! among whom the innocent and defenceless
are more secure than any where else on the globe!"

"Precisely," said Mr. Bythewood, with a placid smile. "But among whom
obnoxious persons, dangerous to our institutions, cannot be tolerated.
As for this affair,"--carelessly, as if what had happened to Penn was of
no particular consequence to anybody present, least of all to him,--"I
don't know anything about it. Of course, I would never go near a popular
demonstration of the kind. I don't say I approve of it, and I don't say
I disapprove of it. These are no ordinary times, Mr. Villars. The south
is already plunged into a revolution."

"Indeed, I fear so!"

"Fear so? I glory that it is so! We are about to build up the most
magnificent empire on which the sun has eve