rtain local election, there was held upon the
grounds a political meeting, giving such individuals as chose to avail
themselves of it the opportunity of expressing their opinions to the
assembled guests and the thirty or forty mountaineers who had suddenly
and without any warning of previous existence appeared upon the scene.

The Colonel had been one of the first called upon, and, to the delight of
his admirers, he responded at once with the utmost grace to the call.

When he ascended the little platform with the slow, light step which was
numbered among his chief attractions and stood before his audience for a
moment looking down at them gently and reflectively from under his
beautiful lashes, a throb of expectation was felt in every tender bosom.

His speech fell short of no desire, being decided to be simple
perfection. His soft voice, his quiet ease of movement, his eloquence,
were all that could be hoped for from mortal man. He mentioned with
high-bred depreciation the fact that he could not fairly call himself a
politician unless as any son of the fair South must be one at least at
heart, however devoid of the gifts which have made her greatest heard
from continent to continent. He was only one of the many who had at stake
their cherished institutions, the homes they loved, the beloved who
brightened those homes, and their own happiness as it was centred in
those homes, and irrevocably bound in that of the fairest land upon which
the fair sun shone.

The applause at this juncture was so great as to oblige him to pause for
a few moments; but it was to be regretted that nine out of ten of the
mountaineers remained entirely unresponsive, crossing their jean-covered
legs and rubbing their lean and grizzled jaws in a soulless manner. They
displayed this apathetic indifference to the most graceful flight of
rhetoric, to the most musical appeals to the hearts of all men loving
freedom, to the announcement that matters had reached a sad and
significant crisis, that the peculiar institutions left as a legacy by
their forefathers were threatened by the Northern fanatics, and that in
the near future the blood of patriots might be poured forth as a libation
upon the soil they loved; to eloquent denunciations of the hirelings and
would-be violators of our rights under the constitution. To all these
they listened, evidently devoting all their slow energies to the
comprehension of it, but they were less moved than might have