bright eyes had sparkled,
merry feet had twinkled, and young hearts beat high with love and hope
and joy of living! And not only joy had passed that way, but sorrow.
In the front upper chamber his mother had died. Vividly he recalled,
as with closed eyes he lay back under the barber's skilful hand, their
last parting and his own poignant grief; for she had been not only his
mother, but a woman of character, who commanded respect and inspired
affection; a beautiful woman whom he had loved with a devotion that
bordered on reverence.

Romance, too, had waved her magic wand over the old homestead. His
memory smiled indulgently as he recalled one scene. In a corner of the
broad piazza, he had poured out his youthful heart, one summer
evening, in strains of passionate devotion, to his first love, a
beautiful woman of thirty who was visiting his mother, and who had
told him between smiles and tears, to be a good boy and wait a little
longer, until he was sure of his own mind. Even now, he breathed, in
memory, the heavy odour of the magnolia blossoms which overhung the
long wooden porch bench or "jogging board" on which the lady sat,
while he knelt on the hard floor before her. He felt very young indeed
after she had spoken, but her caressing touch upon his hair had so
stirred his heart that his vanity had suffered no wound. Why, the
family had owned the house since they had owned the cemetery lot! It
was hallowed by a hundred memories, and now!----

"Will you have oil on yo' hair, suh, or bay rum?"

"Nichols," exclaimed the colonel, "I should like to buy back the old
house. What do you want for it?"

"Why, colonel," stammered the barber, somewhat taken aback at the
suddenness of the offer, "I hadn' r'ally thought 'bout sellin' it. You
see, suh, I've had it now for twenty years, and it suits me, an' my
child'en has growed up in it--an' it kind of has associations, suh."

In principle the colonel was an ardent democrat; he believed in the
rights of man, and extended the doctrine to include all who bore the
human form. But in feeling he was an equally pronounced aristocrat. A
servant's rights he would have defended to the last ditch; familiarity
he would have resented with equal positiveness. Something of this
ancestral feeling stirred within him now. While Nichols's position in
reference to the house was, in principle, equally as correct as the
colonel's own, and superior in point of time--since impressions, like
photograp