ou are. I cert'nly would."

And now anger came to its own again.

"You don't know what you're talking about, Nan Bryerson! You're nothing
but a--a miserable little heathen; my mother said you was!" he cried out
after her.

But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had.

III

OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN

Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before
his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the
recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired
octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he
had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes
lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic
or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they
said--though that could hardly be--until that last day of all when they
fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.

Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke
out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined
it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the
muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any
lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years
to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and
Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy
the guns of his battery.

Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his
commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer
McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among
the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the
hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him
to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without
bitterness.

Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the
crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost
cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley,
facing the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled,
as only a brave man might.

His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot
of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare
sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old
homestead late one evening,