."

"Well?" said I. "That is no more to me than if he were Jones of New
York."

"Daisy!" said Preston. "If you are not a true Southerner, I will never
love you any more."

"What do you mean by a true Southerner? I do not understand."

"Yes, you do. A true Southerner is always a Southerner, and takes the
part of a Southerner in every dispute--right or wrong."

"What makes you dislike Northerners so much?"

"Cowardly Yankees!" was Preston's reply.

"You must have an uncomfortable time among them, if you feel so," I
said.

"There are plenty of the true sort here. I wish you were in Paris,
Daisy; or somewhere else."

"Why?" I said, laughing.

"Safe with my mother, or _your_ mother. You want teaching. You are too
latitudinarian. And you are too thick with the Yankees, by half."

I let this opinion alone, as I could do nothing with it; and our
conversation broke off with Preston in a very bad humour.

The next day, when we were deep in the woods, I asked Dr. Sandford if
he knew Mr. Davis of Mississippi. He answered Yes, rather drily. I
knew the doctor knew everybody.

I asked why Preston called him a great man.

"Does he call him a great man?" Dr. Sandford asked.

"Do you?"

"No, not I, Daisy. But that may not hinder the fact. And I may not
have Mr. Gary's means of judging."

"What means can he have?" I said.

"Daisy," said Dr. Sandford suddenly, when I had forgotten the question
in plunging through a thicket of brushwood, "if the North and the
South should split on the subject of slavery, what side would you
take?"

"What do you mean by a 'split'?" I asked slowly, in my wonderment.

"The States are not precisely like a perfect crystal, Daisy, and
there is an incipient cleavage somewhere about Mason and Dixon's
line."

"I do not know what line that is."

"No. Well, for practical purposes, you may take it as the line between
the slave States and the free."

"But how could there be a split?" I asked.

"There is a wedge applied even now, Daisy--the question whether the
new States forming out of our Western territories, shall have slavery
in them or shall be free States."

I was silent upon this; and we walked and climbed for a little
distance, without my remembering our geological or mineralogical, or
any other objects in view.

"The North say," Dr. Sandford then went on, "that these States shall
be free. The South--or some men at the South--threaten that if they
be, the South will split from