somewhat fuller meaning; because, notwithstanding the Puritan trappings,
traditions, and associations which surround me--visible illustrations of
the self-denying fortitude of the Puritan character and the sombre
simplicity of the Puritan taste and habit--I never felt less out of
place in all my life.

To tell you the truth, I am afraid that I have gained access here on
false pretences; for I am no Cavalier at all; just plain Scotch-Irish;
one of those Scotch-Irish southerners who ate no fire in the green leaf
and has eaten no dirt in the brown, and who, accepting, for the moment,
the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once
sought to ascribe to them--descriptive labels at once classifying and
separating North and South--verbal redoubts along that mythical line
called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists
of other days to be no bridges--I am much disposed to say, "A plague o'
both your houses!"

Each was good enough and bad enough in its way, whilst they lasted; each
in its turn filled the English-speaking world with mourning; and each,
if either could have resisted the infection of the soil and climate they
found here, would be to-day striving at the sword's point to square life
by the iron rule of Theocracy, or to round it by the dizzy whirl of a
petticoat! It is very pretty to read about the Maypole in Virginia and
very edifying and inspiring to celebrate the deeds of the Pilgrim
Fathers. But there is not Cavalier blood enough left in the Old Dominion
to produce a single crop of first families, whilst out in Nebraska and
Iowa they claim that they have so stripped New England of her Puritan
stock as to spare her hardly enough for farm hands. This I do know, from
personal experience, that it is impossible for the stranger-guest,
sitting beneath a bower of roses in the Palmetto Club at Charleston, or
by a mimic log-heap in the Algonquin Club at Boston, to tell the
assembled company apart, particularly after ten o'clock in the evening!
Why, in that great, final struggle between the Puritans and the
Cavaliers--which we still hear sometimes casually mentioned--although it
ended nearly thirty years ago, there had been such a mixing up of
Puritan babies and Cavalier babies during the two or three generations
preceding it, that the surviving grandmothers of the combatants could
not, except for their uniforms, have picked out their own on any field
of battle!

Turning