nything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game
sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims.
There was one of them--the right kind."

"Where?" I asked.

"Why--you're leaning against her headstone!"

The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the
instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said,
sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own
quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him
on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.

"She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don't suppose
until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French,
or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her
husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The
third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the
plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to
the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks
in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly
take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that
lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions
about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating
her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war;
she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening,
walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died.
You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to
single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no
preparation for her trials."

"Except moral elegance," I murmured.

"Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed
it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as
if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward
to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling
us stories of the old times--old rides when the country was wild, old
journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the
steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans
or a famous duel in them--the sort of stories that begin with (for you
seem to know something of it yourself, sir) 'Your grandfather, my
dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious