so ever since. He used to say that chloroform was invented by infidels,
and he would not let them give it to his son, Lawrence, when he broke
his leg on the threshing machine. It was a mania with him, for, when I
was nursing in the hospitals during the war, he told me with his own
lips that he believed the Lord was on our side because we didn't have
chloroform."

"He had a good many odd ideas," said the general, "but he is dead now,
poor man."

"He raised up my dear father when he was struck down with paralysis,"
murmured Aunt Griselda.

When dinner was over the general returned to the front porch, and
Eugenia and the puppy went with Bernard to the orchard to look for green
apples.

They started out in single file; Bernard, a bright-faced, snub-nosed boy
with a girlish mouth, a little in advance, Eugenia following, and the
puppy at her heels. On the way across the meadow, where myriads of
grasshoppers darted with a whirring noise beneath the leaves of coarse
mullein plants or the slender, unopened pods of milkweed, the puppy made
sudden desperate skirmishes into the tangled pathside, pointing
ineffectually at the heavy-legged insects, his red tongue lolling and
his short tail wagging. Up the steep ascent of the orchard a rocky trail
ran, bordered by a rail fence. From the point of the hill one could see
the adjoining country unrolled like a map, olive heights melting into
emerald valleys, bare clearings into luxuriant crops, running a
chromatic scale from the dry old battlefields surrounding Kingsborough
to the arable "bottoms" beside the enrichening river.