is heart action is perfect. Patience, care, and
love will save him. There is no cause for immediate alarm."

CHAPTER III

AUGUSTUS CAESAR

Phil early found the home of the Camerons the most charming spot in town.
As he sat in the old-fashioned parlour beside Margaret, his brain seethed
with plans for building a hotel on a large scale on the other side of the
Square and restoring her home intact.

The Cameron homestead was a large brick building with an ample porch
looking out directly on the Court House Square, standing in the middle of
a lawn full of trees, flowers, shrubbery, and a wilderness of evergreen
boxwood planted fifty years before. It was located on the farm from which
it had always derived its support. The farm extended up into the village
itself, with the great barn easily seen from the street.

Phil was charmed with the doctor's genial personality. He often found the
father a decidedly easier person to get along with than his handsome
daughter. The Rev. Hugh McAlpin was a daily caller, and Margaret had a
tantalizing way of showing her deference to his opinions.

Phil hated this preacher from the moment he laid eyes on him. His
pugnacious piety he might have endured but for the fact that he was
good-looking and eloquent. When he rose in the pulpit in all his sacred
dignity, fixed his eyes on Margaret, and began in tenderly modulated voice
to tell about the love of God, Phil clinched his fist. He didn't care to
join the Presbyterian church, but he quietly made up his mind that, if it
came to the worst and she asked him, he would join anything. What made him
furious was the air of assurance with which the young divine carried
himself about Margaret, as if he had but to say the word and it would be
fixed as by a decree issued from before the foundations of the world.

He was pleased and surprised to find that his being a Yankee made no
difference in his standing or welcome. The people seemed unconscious of
the part his father played at Washington. Stoneman's Confiscation Bill had
not yet been discussed in Congress, and the promise of land to the negroes
was universally regarded as a hoax of the League to win their followers.
The old Commoner was not an orator. Hence his name was scarcely known in
the South. The Southern people could not conceive of a great leader except
one who expressed his power through the megaphone of oratory. They held
Charles Sumner chiefly responsible for Reconstruction.