“From Dixie’s Land,” he said, with a laugh. “’Way down in Dixie.”

In a few words, and with a picturesqueness of phrase in which I noted a rich Southern flavor, he explained the phenomenon of his presence in New York.  After Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court-House, my cousin had managed to reach Washington, where he was fortunate enough to get a free pass to Baltimore.  He had nearly starved to death in making his way out of Virginia.  To quote his words, “The wind that is supposed to be tempered expressly for shorn lambs was not blowing very heavily about that time.”  At Baltimore he fell in with a former Mobile acquaintance, from whom he borrowed a sum sufficient to pay the fare to New York—­a humiliating necessity, as my cousin remarked, for a man who had been a colonel in Stonewall Jackson’s brigade.  Flagg had reached the city before daybreak, and had wandered for hours along the water-front, waiting for some place to open, in order that he might look up my address in the Directory, if I were still in the land of the living.  He had had what he described as an antediluvian sandwich the previous day at two o’clock, since which banquet no food had passed his lips.

“And I’ll be hanged,” he said, “if the first shop that took down its shutters wasn’t a restaurant, with a cursed rib of roast beef, flanked with celery, and a ham in curl-papers staring at me through the window-pane.  A little tin sign, with ‘Meals at All Hours’ painted on it—­what did they want to go and do that for?—­knocked the breath clean out of me.  I gave one look, and ploughed up the street, for if I had stayed fifteen seconds longer in front of that plate-glass, I reckon I would have burst it in.  Well, I put distance between me and temptation, and by and by I came to a newspaper office, where I cornered a Directory.  I was on the way to your house when we collided; and now, Tom Wesley, for heaven’s sake introduce me to something to eat.  There is no false pride about me; I’d shake hands with a bone.”

The moisture was ready to gather in my eyes, and for a second or two I was unable to manage my voice.  Here was my only kinsman on the verge of collapse—­one miserable sandwich, like a thin plank, between him and destruction.  My own plenteous though hasty morning meal turned into reproachful lead within me.

“Dear old boy!” I cried again.  “Come along!  I can see that you are nearly famished.”

“I’ve a right smart appetite, Thomas, there’s no mistake about that.  If appetite were assets, I could invite a whole regiment to rations.”

I had thrust my hand under his arm, and was dragging him towards a small oyster shop, whose red balloon in a side street had caught my eye, when I suddenly remembered that it was imperative on me to be at the office at eight o’clock that morning, in order to prepare certain papers wanted by the president of the board, previous to a meeting of the directors.  (I was at that time under-secretary of the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company.) The recollection of the business which had caused me to be on foot at this unusual hour brought me to a dead halt.  I dropped my cousin’s arm, and stood looking at him helplessly.  It seemed so inhospitable, not to say cold-blooded, to send him off to get his breakfast alone.  Flagg misinterpreted my embarrassment.