eant; nor failure of the crops; nor the way the slaves were treated.
None of these things affected him. Indeed none of them did he know
anything of. Nor was he an expert on duelling. It must have been Kate.
Yes--of course--it was Kate and her treatment of him. The "tide" was
what had swept them apart.

"Oh, I know," he cried in an animated tone. "He meant Kate. Tell
me--what did he say about her?" He had searched his books for some
parallel from which to draw a conclusion, but none of them had given him
any relief. May be Mr. Horn had solved the problem.

"He said she was the first of the flood, though he was mighty sorry for
you both; and he said, too, that, as she was the first to strike out for
the shore, Kennedy Square ought to build a triumphal arch for her," and
St. George looked quizzically at Harry.

"Well, do you think there is any common sense in that?" blurted out the
boy, twisting himself in his chair so he could get a better look at his
uncle's face.

"No--it doesn't sound like it, but it may be profound wisdom all the
same, if you can only see it from Richard's point of view. Try it.
There's a heap of brains under his cranium."

Harry fell to tapping the arm of his chair. Queer reasoning this of Mr.
Horn's, he said to himself. He had always thought that he and his father
were on the tip-top of any kind of tide, flood or ebb--and as for Kate,
she was the white gull that skimmed its crest!

Again Harry dropped into deep thought, shifting his legs now and then in
his restless, impatient way. If there was any comfort to be gotten out
of this new doctrine he wanted to probe it to the bottom.

"And what does he say of Mr. Poe? Does he think he's a drunken lunatic,
like some of the men at the club?"

"No, he thinks he is one of the greatest literary geniuses the country
has yet produced. He has said so for years--ever since he began to
write. Willis first became acquainted with Mr. Poe through a letter
Richard gave him, and now that the papers are full of him, and everybody
is talking about him, these backbiters like Bowdoin want to get into
line and say they always thought so. But Richard has never wavered. Of
course Poe loses his balance and topples backward once in a while--but
he's getting over it. That is his mistake and it is unfortunate, but
it isn't a crime. I can forgive him anything he does so he keeps to
his ideals. If he had had a better bringing up and knew the difference
between good rain-w