ay be said, for the dawn
of that new order of things which only the wiser and more farsighted
men--men like Richard Horn--were able to discern. While many of the old
regime were willing to admit that the patriarchal life, with the negro
as the worker and the master as the spender, had seen its best days, but
few of them, at the period of these chronicles, realized that the genius
of Morse, Hoe, and McCormick, and a dozen others, whose inventions were
just beginning to be criticised, and often condemned, were really the
chief factors in the making of a new and greater democracy: that the
cog, the drill, the grate-bar, and the flying shuttle would ere long
supplant the hoe and the scythe; and that when the full flood of this
new era was reached their old-time standards of family pride, reckless
hospitality, and even their old-fashioned courtesy would well-nigh be
swept into space. The storm raised over this and the preceding duel had
they but known it, was but a notch in the tide-gauge of this flood.

"I understand, St. George, that you could have stopped that disgraceful
affair the other night if you had raised your hand," Judge Pancoast
had blurted out in an angry tone at the club the week following. "I did
raise it, judge," replied St. George, calmly drawing off his gloves.

"They don't say so--they say you stood by and encouraged it."

"Quite true," he answered in his dryest voice. "When I raised my hand it
was to drop my handkerchief. They fired as it fell."

"And a barbarous and altogether foolish piece of business, Temple.
There is no justification for that sort of thing, and if Rutter wasn't
a feudal king up in his own county there would be trouble over it. It's
God's mercy the poor fellow wasn't killed. Fine beginning, isn't it, for
a happy married life?"

"Better not have any wife at all, judge, than wed a woman whose good
name you are afraid to defend with your life. There are some of us who
can stand anything but that, and Harry is built along the same lines. A
fine, noble, young fellow--did just right and has my entire confidence
and my love. Think it over, judge," and he strolled into the card-room,
picked up the morning paper, and buried his face in its columns, his
teeth set, his face aflame with suppressed disgust at the kind of blood
running in the judge's veins.

The colonel's treatment of his son also came in for heated discussion.
Mrs. Cheston was particularly outspoken. Such quixotic action on t