roses," he now admitted with a delicate touch of
pride.

"Don't forget your old ones! I never shall."

There was pleasure in his face at this tribute, which, he could see,
came from the heart. But, thus pictured to him, the old ladies brought
a further idea quite plainly into his expression; and he announced it.
"Some of them are not without thorns."

"What would you give," I quickly replied, "for anybody--man or
woman--who could not, on an occasion, make themselves sharply felt?"

To this he returned a full but somewhat absent-minded assent. He seemed
to be reflecting that he himself didn't care to be the "occasion" upon
which an old lady rose should try her thorns; and I was inclined to
suspect that his intimate aunt had been giving him a wigging.

Anyhow, I stood ready to keep it up, this interchange of
lofty civilities. I, too, could wear the courtly red-heels of
eighteenth-century procedure, and for just as long as his Southern
up-bringing inclined him to wear them; I hadn't known Aunt Carola for
nothing! But we, as I have said, were not destined to dance any minuet.

We had been moving, very gradually, and without any attention to our
surroundings, to and fro in the beautiful sweet churchyard. Flowers were
everywhere, growing, budding, blooming; color and perfume were parts of
the very air, and beneath these pretty and ancient tombs, graven with
old dates and honorable names, slept the men and women who had given
Kings Port her high place is; in our history. I have never, in this
country, seen any churchyard comparable to this one; happy, serene dead,
to sleep amid such blossoms and consecration! Good taste prevailed here;
distinguished men lay beneath memorial stones that came no higher than
your waist or shoulder; there was a total absence of obscure grocers
reposing under gigantic obelisks; to earn a monument here you must win
a battle, or do, at any rate, something more than adulterate sugar and
oil. The particular monument by which young John Mayrant and I found
ourselves standing, when we reached the point about the ladies and the
thorns, had a look of importance and it caught his eye, bringing him
back to where we were. Upon his pointing to it, and before we had spoken
or I had seen the name, I inquired eagerly: "Not the lieutenant of the
Bon Homme Richard?" and then saw that Mayrant was not the name upon it.

My knowledge of his gallant sea-fighting namesake visibly gratified him.
"I wish it were,"