a mighty small fortune Rose Montgomery brought me! But she was Rose
Montgomery, and I got her when no other man had the courage to ask for
her. You know an ancestor of hers founded Suez. That's how it got its
name. His name was Ezra and hers was Susan, don't you see?"

"I think I make it out," drawled the listener.

"But she didn't any more have a fortune than I did. She and her mother,
who died about a year after, were living here in town just on the wages
of three or four hired-out slaves, and----"

The younger voice interrupted with a question indolently drawn out: "Was
she as beautiful in those days as they say?"

"Why, allowing for some natural exaggeration, yes."

"You built Rosemont about the time her mother died, didn't you?"

"Yes, about three years before the war broke out. It was the only piece
of land she had left; too small for a plantation, but just the thing for
a college."

"It is neatly named," pursued the questioner; "who did it?"

"I," half soliloquized the narrator, wrapped in the solitude of his own
originality.

He moved into view, a large man of forty, unmilitary, despite his good
gray broadcloth and wealth of gold braid, though of commanding and most
comfortable mien. His upright coat-collar, too much agape, showed a
clerical white cravat. His right arm was in a sling. He began to pick
his way out of the brambles, dusting himself with a fine handkerchief.
The horse came to meet him.

At the same time his young companion stepped upon a fallen tree, and
stood to gaze, large-eyed, like the horse, across the sun-bathed scene.
He seemed scant nineteen. His gray shirt was buttoned with locust
thorns, his cotton-woolen jacket was caught under an old cartridge belt,
his ragged trousers were thrust into bursted boots, and he was thickly
powdered with white and yellow dust. His eyes swept slowly over the
battle-ground to some low, wooded hills that rose beyond it against the
pale northwestern sky.

"Major," said he.

The Major was busy lifting himself carefully into the saddle and
checking his horse's eagerness to be off. But the youth still gazed, and
said again, "Isn't that it?"

"What?"

"Rosemont."

"It is!" cried the officer, standing in his stirrups, and smiling fondly
at a point where, some three miles away by the line of sight, a dark
roof crowned by a white-railed lookout peeped over the tree-tops. "It's
Rosemont--my own Rosemont! The view's been opened by cutting the woods
off