with vivacity. "But you made me laugh so."

VI: In the Churchyard
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 nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil

and discontent. We're no longer a small people living and dying for a
great idea; we're a big people living and dying for money. And these

ladies of yours--well, they have made me homesick for a national and a
social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They're like

legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet clean-cut
faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight we all

once talked and danced in--sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning inside
glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of a warm

evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright silver;
the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a square

piano, singing Moore's melodies--and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore Perry,
perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!"

John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. "Yes, that's it;
that's all it," he mused. You do understand."

But I had to finish my flight. "Such quiet faces are gone now in the
breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing

trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of
their competing wives--while yours have lingered on, spared by your very

adversity. And that's why I shall miss your old people when they follow
mine--because they're the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the

bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw that
it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of

independence."
I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener's

face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go--home to
the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it

did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out to
this new quaintance" target="_blank" title="n.相识；熟人，相识的人">acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend to

expose to very few old ones.
"Haven't you noticed," I said, "or don't you feel it, away down here in

your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come
over the American people?"

He wasn't sure.
"They've lost their grip on patriotism."

He smiled. "We did that here in 1861."
"Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your

country, and you love it still. That's just my point, just my strange
discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we've lost. Our big men

fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our
big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it.

Rather different, don't you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely
meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of the

individual's purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.--
Of course," I added, taking myself up, "that's too sweeping a statement.

The right sort of American isn't extinct in the North by any means. But
there's such a commercialdeluge of the wrong sort, that the others

sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket."
"You certainly understand it all," John Mayrant repeated. "It's amazing

to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private
notions."

I laughed. "Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country."
"Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney," he went on. "I didn't suppose

anybody had thought things like that, except myself."
"Oh," I again said lightly, "any American--any, that is, of the world--

who has a colonialbackground for his family, has thought, probably, very
much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or

gibberish to the new people."
He took me up with animation. "The new people! My goodness, sir, yes!

Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?" His diction now
(and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity)

grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. "You have
seen Newport?" he said.

"Yes; now and then."
"But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I

had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road
to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity

obsolete."
"Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it's not all quite so--

so advanced--as that, you know. That's not the whole of Newport."
He hastened to explain. "Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the

honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my
name was known because they had retained their good position since the

days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself.
I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir."

"Three?"
"Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people

who--who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so
plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can

divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures,
those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who

need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin' down nor bobbing up, but
who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the

beginning and continue to do so. And I don't believe that there are any
nicer people in the world than those."

"Nowhere!" I exclaimed. "When Near York does her best, what's better?--If
only those best set the pace!"

"If only!" he assented. "But it's the others who get into the papers, who