e I had best go to Kings Port. If I
returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, a
chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of men
and women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine:
ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea--

"--besides having acquired," my Aunt was so good as to say, "sufficient
personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather
not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you will
have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear
through Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo's spirited, reckless son."

You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance
of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timeworn
familiarity.

"Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I," my Aunt
handsomely finished, "will make the journey a present to you."

This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my
flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly
from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent
overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart at
the outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of my
Aunt Carola and set forth to Kings Port.

"Come back one of us," was her parting benediction.

II: I Vary My Lunch

Thus it was that I came to sojourn in the most appealing, the most
lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and
distinction seem also to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet
waves that ripple round her Southern front, speak in the church-bells
on Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the
perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the
high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the
retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes
looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the
live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my
city, how I should love her!

But though my city she cannot be, the enchanting image of her is mine to
keep, to carry with me wheresoever I may go; for who, having seen her,
could forget her? Therefore I thank Aunt Carola for this gift, and for
what must always go with it in my mind, the quiet and strange romance
which I saw happen, and came finally