ck took this
philosophical view of it, and soon gave himself up to the merry social
life of his surroundings with an animation that led his hosts to hope
that he might be won over to the Confederate cause. Very young men do
not sorrow long or deeply, and Jack was young. He was neither reckless
nor trifling, but I am sure that none of the adulating groups that made
much of the handsome Yankee in Richmond that season would have suspected
that the young man looked in his mirror night and morning, frowned
darkly at the reflected image he saw there, and said, solemnly, "You are
a murderer!" It was by no means a tragic accent in which this thrilling
apostrophe was spoken. It was very much in the tone that a woman employs
when she looks hastily in the mirror and utters a soft "What a fright I
am!" apparently receiving comforting contradiction enough from the
mirror to make the remark worth frequent repetition.

As a matter of fact, however, Jack was not insensible to the awkward
complication of his predicament. Grief as a mantle is difficult to
adjust to the shoulders of the young. It is melted by the ardor of
companionship as swiftly as it is spun by the loom of adversity. His
interest in the strange scenes that the war brought to pass, his
association with people--intimate in a sense with the leading forces of
rebellion, the airs of incipient grandeur, these raw instruments of
government gave themselves--all these things engrossed the observant
faculties of the young man, who looked out upon the serio-comic
harlequinade playing about him as a hostage of the Roundheads might have
taken part in the showy festivities of the Cavaliers, in the years when
the chances of battle had not gone over wholly to the Puritans. Not that
the figure illustrates the contrasting conditions adequately. For, if
the South prided itself at all--and the South did pride itself
vauntingly, clamorously, and incessantly--it made its chief boast the
point that its people were the gentry of the land, and that under the
rebel banner the hosts of chivalry had assembled anew to make all manner
of fine things the rule of life. Jack, writing and talking of his few
months' experience, dwelt with wonder upon the curious ignorance of the
two peoples respecting each other. Mason and Dixon's line separated two
civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other
on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea. The hierarchy not only
seemed to love