om the father
of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his
sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole
reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she
it was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happy
that her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, save
to please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected Salic
Scion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation.
Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it,
while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This,
among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her;
she stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I were
lacking in deference did I pass her and her Scions by without due
mention,--employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately.
Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me,
nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew
quite well who the boy was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered
one of his grandmothers whom she had visited during her own girlhood,
long before the war, both in Kings Port and at the family plantation;
and this old memory led her to express a kindly interest in him. How odd
and far away that interest seems, now that it has been turned to cold
displeasure!

Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell
you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple which
Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to
feel rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I had
known such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dame
of my town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fashion sit
constantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she was
descended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed this
to me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned it
only that very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have
descended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, adding
that she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach de
Gotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publication
to me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or
upwards, and for this trifling sum you were furni