“That’s because you haven’t been
here long enough,” he declared.
Over us, gently, from somewhere across the gardens
and the walls, came a noiseless water breeze, to which
the roses moved and nodded among the tombs. They
gave him a fanciful thought. “Look at them!
They belong to us, and they know it. They’re
saying, ‘Yes; yes; yes,’ all day long.
I don’t know why on earth I’m talking
in this way to you!” he broke off with vivacity.
“But you made me laugh so.”
“Then it was a good laugh, indeed!” I
cried heartily.
“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our
fine manners!” he begged comically. “We’ve
satisfied each other that we have them! I feel
so lonely; and my aunt just now—well, never
mind about that. But you really must excuse us
about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing.
I see it, because I’m of the new generation,
since the war, and—well, I’ve been
to other places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all
of them, you know, can’t see it. And I
wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t
ever attempt to explain to them that the world has
to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t
see the necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they
stopped, you see, just like a clock. Their hand
points to 1865—it has never moved a minute
since. And some day”— his voice
grew suddenly tender—“they’ll
go, one by one, to join the still older ones.
And I shall miss them very much.”
For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses
nodding and moving. Then I said: “May
I say that I shall miss them, too?”
He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port
people?” He didn’t invite outsiders to
do that!
“Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured.
“It was the same thing once with us.”
“The same thing—in the North?”
His tone still held me off.
“The same sort of dear old people—I
mean charming, peppery, refined, courageous people;
in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that
has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.”
And, as certain beloved memories of men and women
rose in my mind, I continued: “If you knew
some of the Boston elder people as I have known them,
you would warm with the same admiration that is filling
me as I see your people of Kings Port.”
“But politics?” the young Southerner slowly
suggested.
“Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!”
I exclaimed. “Of course, we had a family
quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine
one, too! We knew each other, we visited each
other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept up relations;
we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation
to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the
current from their fathers, back and back to the old
beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke and Rip Van Winkle!
It’s all gone, all done, all over. You have
to be a small, well-knit country for that sort of
exquisite personal unitedness. There’s
