llows went over the wood, and once a pair of phoebes
amused me by an uncommonly pretty lover's quarrel. Truly it was a
pleasant hour. In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with
a load of wood. We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the
smallness of his load. Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to
drag seven or eight miles over such roads. Possibly he understood me as
implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had
no such purpose, for he went on to say: "In 1861, when this beautiful
war broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers. We didn't
have to do _this_. But I don't complain. If I hadn't got a bullet in me,
I should do pretty well."

"Then you were in the war?" I said.

"Oh, yes, yes, sir! I was in the Confederate service. Yes, sir, I'm a
Southerner to the backbone. My grandfather was a ----" (I missed the
patronymic), "and commanded St. Augustine."

The name had a foreign sound, and the man's complexion was swarthy, and
in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan. I might as well have
touched a lighted match to powder. His eyes flashed, and he came round
the tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick.

"Minorcan!" he broke out. "Spain and the island of Minorca are two
places, ain't they?" I admitted meekly that they were.

"You are English, ain't you?" he went on. "You are English,--Yankee
born,--ain't you?"

I owned it.

"Well, I'm Spanish. That ain't Minorcan. My grandfather was a ----, and
commanded St. Augustine. He couldn't have done that if he had been
Minorcan."

By this time he was quieting down a bit. His father remembered the
Indian war. The son had heard him tell about it.

"Those were dangerous times," he remarked. "You couldn't have been
standing out here in the woods then."

"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I.

"No, no, not now." But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_
wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with a
final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is always
in danger."

After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my
unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, and
so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot my
manners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is not
prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either sense
of the word, by his dr