ith Venetia Frances Rhett," said she. "Ought to be
ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing;
goodness knows, they're bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death
and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them--"

She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the
barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.

That evening after supper Miss Pinckney's mind warmed to thoughts of the
good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the
recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth
much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.

She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and
whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the
men and women who had made American literature in the '50's and '60's,
many of whom she had known when young.

Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen
Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood,
N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet
her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the
_Southern Literary Messenger_, the _Home Journal_, the _Mirror_ and the
_Broadway Journal_.

People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very
names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating
epoch beyond and around the Civil War.

"They're all dead and gone," said she, "and folk nowadays don't seem to
trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there's
nothing they write now that's as good--I remember poor Thomas Ward.
'Flaccus' was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always
with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the
_Knickerbocker Journal_; I heard him recite one of his things.

"'And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss,
That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.'

"That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn't look
as if he'd ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better
than they write nowadays."

The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias,
white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the
moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston,
voices, the sound of traffic and then