. And that's why I shall miss your old people when they follow
mine--because they're the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the
bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw
that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of
independence."

I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener's
face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go--home to
the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it
did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out
to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend
to expose to very few old ones.

"Haven't you noticed," I said, "or don't you feel it, away down here in
your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come
over the American people?"

He wasn't sure.

"They've lost their grip on patriotism."

He smiled. "We did that here in 1861."

"Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your
country, and you love it still. That's just my point, just my strange
discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we've lost. Our big men
fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our
big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it.
Rather different, don't you see? When I walk about in the North, I
merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of
the individual's purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet
Americans.--Of course," I added, taking myself up, "that's too sweeping
a statement. The right sort of American isn't extinct in the North by
any means. But there's such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that
the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket."

"You certainly understand it all," John Mayrant repeated. "It's amazing
to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private
notions."

I laughed. "Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country."

"Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney," he went on. "I didn't suppose
anybody had thought things like that, except myself."

"Oh," I again said lightly, "any American--any, that is, of the
world--who has a colonial background for his family, has thought,
probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all
Greek or gibberish to the new people."

He took me up with animation. "The new people! My goodness, sir, yes!
Have y