ks of Peter's stay at the manor it had grown to be the
Captain's habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon,
and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.

The old man was writing a book called "Reminiscences of Peace and War."
His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal
reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America
during the decade of 1908-18. During just that decade it seemed as if the
aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who
had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave
regime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to
commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and
its vanished deeds.

On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but
his reminiscences did not get on. He pinched a bit of floss from the nib
of his pen and tried to swing into the period of which he was writing.
He read over a few pages of his copy as mental priming, but his thoughts
remained flat and dull. Indeed, his whole life, as he reviewed it in the
waning afternoon, appeared empty and futile. It seemed hardly worth
while to go on.

The Captain had come to that point in his memoirs where the Republican
representative from Knox County had set going the petard which had
wrecked his political career.

From the very beginnings of his labors the old lawyer had looked forward
to writing just this period of his life. He meant to clear up his name
once for all. He meant to use invective, argument, testimony and a
powerful emotional appeal, such as a country lawyer invariably attempts
with a jury.

But now that he had arrived at the actual composition of his defense, he
sat biting his penholder, with all the arguments he meant to advance
slipped from his mind. He could not recall the points of the proof. He
could not recall them with Peter Siner moving restlessly about the room,
glancing through the window, unsettled, nervous, on the verge of eloping
with a negress.

His secretary's tragedy smote the old man. The necessity of doing
something for Peter put his thoughts to rout. A wild idea occurred to
the Captain that if he should write the exact truth, perhaps his memoirs
might serve Peter as a signal against a futile, empty journey.

But the thought no sooner appeared than it was rejected. In the Anglo-
Saxon, especially the Anglo-Saxon of