families which had been planted
here as a good country for the culture of wild oats."

"I suppose that in the eighteenth century this was as remote a place as
any to lose black sheep in, if losing was their desire," suggested
John.

"It's quite true, quite true, what Bob says," Mrs. Carroll took up the
explanation. "Mr. Carroll used to tell me that he knew it to be a fact
that Bud Yarebrough's father--Bud is a ne'er-do-weel who lives in a
cove not many miles from here, Katrina, my dear--was a great-grandson
of one of the Dukes of Calverley."

"Then Melissa's baby is the Lady Sydney Melissa Something-or-other!"
laughed Sydney.

"There's a legend of a penal colony, too," said Patton.

"That is disputed," replied Mrs. Carroll.

"If there was one, Pink Pressley is of its lineage, I am sure," said
Sydney.

"If heredity counts for anything, I should think that a colony of black
sheep whose diet had been wild oats would account for all the
lawlessness of the community," offered John.

"For a great deal of it, undoubtedly, and their life of freedom from
restraint for so many years would be responsible for more."

"But these people are not close about you here," exclaimed Katrina.

"Indeed, they are. They are our neighbors and our friends. Why, there's
a tenant on our place who has been tried twice for murder."

"Bob and I found a deserted still in the woods over the creek the other
day," said Sydney. "That suggests another of our friends' occupations."

"But your influence must be at work among them constantly."

"We hope it is, and that is why we lay stress upon the compositeness of
our settlement," said Mrs. Carroll. "There are the country people we've
been telling you about, and there's a group of what we call
Neighborhood people, for distinction's sake. The Delaunays at the Cliff
were originally from New Orleans, and the Hugers were from Charleston,
and we came from Virginia. Before the war we used to come over the
mountains every summer in carriages to take refuge from the heat of the
lowlands, and after the war we were glad to live here permanently."

"It was post-bellum poverty that drove us here from the
Scotch-Presbyterian settlements in the middle of the State," said
Patton. "We're another element."

"And is there really fusion going on as there is in other parts of the
country?" asked Katrina.

"My people have assimilated with the peasantry, as I suppose Mrs.
Carroll calls them, ever since they c