an I might have forgotten, but that bunch of seals had
occupied for three long years a particular corner of my memory; and in
the instant that my eyes fell upon it, I saw again the ragged hill
covered with pokeberry, yarrow, and stunted sumach, the anchored vessel
outlined against the rosy sunset, and the panting stranger, who had
stopped to rest with his hand on my shoulder. I remembered suddenly that
I wanted to become the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad.

He stood there now in all his redundant flesh before me, his large
mottled cheeks inflated with laughter, his full red lips pursed into a
gay and mocking expression. To me he personified success, happiness,
achievement--the other shining extreme from my own obscurity and
commonness; but the effect upon poor little Miss Matoaca was quite the
opposite, I judged the next minute, from the one that he had intended. I
watched her fragile shoulders straighten and a glow rather than a flash
of spirit pass into her uplifted face.

"With your record, General Bolingbroke," she said, in a quavering yet
courageous voice, "you may refuse your approval, but not your respect,
to a matter of principle."

The roguish twinkle, which was still so charming, appealed like the lost
spirit of youth in the General's eyes.

"Ah, Miss Matoaca," he rejoined, in his most gallant manner, "principles
do not apply to ladies!"

At this Miss Matoaca drew herself up almost haughtily, and I felt as I
looked at her that only her sex had kept her from becoming a general
herself.

"It is very painful to me to disagree with the gentlemen I know," she
said, "but when it is a matter of conviction I feel that even the
respect of gentlemen should be sacrificed. My sister Mitty considers me
quite indelicate, but I cannot conceal from you that--" her voice broke
and dropped, but rose again instantly with a clear, silvery sound, "I
consider that taxation without representation is tyranny."

A virgin martyr refusing to sacrifice a dove to Venus might have uttered
her costly heresy in such a voice and with such a look; but the General
met it suavely with a flourish of his wide-brimmed hat and a blandishing
smile. He was one of those gentlemen of the old school, I came to know
later, to whom it was an inherent impossibility to appear without
affectation in the presence of a member of the opposite sex. A high
liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy,
c