young though, same
age as you, I reckon--called on some Cracker girls back in the woods and
the Northern feller staid thar two or three days. Think of it--Cracker
girls! Now, if'ted been niggers, instead of Crackers!"

"Ugh!" the stranger exclaimed, wakened into something like life. "Don't
talk any more about that man! He must have been a sneak and villain and
a low-lived dog, and if there is any meaner name you can give him, do
so. It will fit him well, and please me."

"Call him a Cracker, but a Florida one. Georgy is mostly better--not up
to so much snuff, you know," the Georgian suggested, while the
Northerner drew a quick breath and thought of Mandy Ann, and wondered
where she was and if he should see her again.

He felt as if there was not a dry thread in one of his garments when his
companion left him, and returning to his friends reported that he hadn't
made much out of the chap. He wasn't from New York, nor Boston, nor
Chicago, and "I don't know where in thunder he is from, nor his name
nuther. I forgot to ask it, he was so stiff and offish. He was in
college with Tom Hardy and visited him years ago; that's all I know,"
the planter said, and after that the stranger was left mostly to
himself, while the passengers busied themselves with gossip, and the
scenery, and trying to keep cool.

The day was hot and grew hotter as the sun rose higher in the heavens,
and the stranger felt very uncomfortable, but it was not the heat which
affected him as much as the terrible network of circumstances which he
had woven for himself. It was the harvest he was reaping as the result
of one false step, when his brain was blurred and he was somebody
besides the elegant gentleman whom people felt it an honor to know. He
was himself now, crushed inwardly, but carrying himself just as proudly
as if no mental fire were consuming him, making him think seriously more
than once of jumping into the river and ending it all. He was very
luxurious and fastidious in his tastes, and would have nothing unseemly
in his home at the North, where he had only to say to his servants come
and they came, and where, if he died on his rosewood bedstead with
silken hangings, they would make him a grand funeral--smother him with
flowers, and perhaps photograph him as he lay in state. Here, if he
ended his life, in the river, with alligators and turtles, he would be
fished up a sorry spectacle, and laid upon the deck with weeds and ferns
clinging to hi