s Port, she said, must take
a consistent position; and for her part, so far as behavior went, she
didn't see much to choose between the couple. "As to whether Mr. Mayrant
had really concealed the discovery of his fortune," she continued, "I
asked Miss Josephine--in a perfectly nice way, of course. But old Mr.
St. Michael Beaugarcon, who has always had the estate in charge, did
that. It is only a life estate, unless Mr. Mayrant has lawful issue.
Well, he will have that now, and all that money will be his to
squander."

Aunt Carola had written me again this morning, but I had been in no
haste to open her letter; my neglect of the Bombos did not weigh too
heavily upon me, I fear, but I certainly did put off reading what I
expected to be a reprimand. And concerning this I was right; her first
words betokened reprimand at once. "My dear nephew Augustus," she began,
in her fine, elegant handwriting. That was always her mode of address
to me when something was coming, while at other times it would be, less
portentously, "My dear Augustus," or "My dear nephew "; but whenever
my name and my relationship to her occurred conjointly, I took the
communication away with me to some corner, and opened it in solitude.

It wasn't about the Bombos, though; and for what she took me to task I
was able to defend myself, I think, quite adequately. She found fault
with me for liking the South too much, and this she based upon the
enthusiastic accounts of Kings Port and its people that I had written
to her; nor had she at all approved of my remarks on the subject of the
negro, called forth by Daddy Ben and his grandson Charles Cotesworth.

"When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola) to admire Kings Port good-breeding,
I did not send you to forget your country. Remember that those people
were its mortal enemies; that besides their treatment of our prisoners
in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander) they
displayed in their dealings, both social and political, an arrogance
in success and a childish petulance at opposition, which we who saw and
suffered can never forget, any more than we can forget our loved ones
who laid down their lives for this cause."

These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she
termed my "disloyalty," but they will serve to indicate her feeling
about the Civil War. It was--on her side--precisely the feeling of all
the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side. But why should it be mine? And