ly forgotten my talk with Mr. George Grey. The North
and the South will never put an end to their differences without
bloodshed."

It seemed a strange opinion to John. He had thought so when he heard
their talk, but now the clergyman's earnestness and some better
understanding of the half-century's bitter feeling made him thoughtful.
Rising to his feet, he said, "Uncle Jim does not agree with you, and Aunt
Ann and her brother, Henry Grey, think that Mr. Buchanan will bring all
our troubles to an end. Of course, sir, I don't know, but"--and his voice
rose--"if there ever should be such a war, I am on Uncle Jim's side, and
being out of West Point would not keep me out of the fight."

Rivers shook his head. "It will come, John. Few men think as I do, and
your uncle considers me, I suspect, to be governed by my unhappy way of
seeing the dark side of things. He says that I am a bewildered pessimist
about politics. A pessimist I may be, but it is the habitually hopeful
meliorist who is just now perplexed past power to think straight."

John's interest was caught for the moment by the word, "meliorist." "What
is a meliorist, sir?" he asked. "Oh, a wild insanity of hopefulness. You
all have it. I dislike to talk about the sad future, and I wonder men at
the North are so blind."

He fell again to mere musings, a self-absorbed man, while John, attracted
by a squirrel's gambols and used to the rector's long silences, wandered
near by among the pines, with a vagabond mind on this or that, and
watching the alert little acrobat of the forest. As he moved about, he
recalled his first walks to the cabin with Leila and the wild thing he
had said one day--and her reply. One ages fast, at seventeen, and now he
wondered if he had been quite wise, and with the wisdom and authority of
a year and a half of mental growth punished his foolish boy-past with
severity of reproach. He had failed for a time to hear, or at least to
hear with attention, the low-voiced soliloquies in which Mr. Rivers
sometimes indulged. McGregor, an observant man, said that Rivers's mind
jumped from thought to thought, and that his talk had at times no
connective tissue and was hard to follow.

Now he spoke louder. "No one, John, no one sees that every new compromise
compromises principles and honour. Have you read any of the speeches of a
man named Lincoln in Illinois? He got a considerable vote in that
nominating convention."

"No, sir."

"Then read it--read