without breaking his neck, and it would take five hundred
millions to do that.

It may be, as the doctor laments, that "The old Virginia gentleman,
All of the olden time," has passed away, the colonial house is
modernized, and the ghost, the killing of whom would be "an enormity
far greater than the crime of killing a live man," has been laid to
rest for half a century, but the old scenes and the old-time life come
back to us who once knew it, in the pages of the perennial boy who
recalls the time when "me and Billy Ivins and the other fellows set
forth with six pine poles and a cymling full of the best and biggest
fishing worms," to fish in the Appomattox where it "curves around the
foot of Uncle Jim's plantation," and where there is a patriarchal
beech with a tangle of roots whereon the Randolphs of historic note
were wont to repose in the days long gone. This fishing party is under
the fair October skies when "the morn, like an Eastern queen, is
sumptuously clad in blue and gold; the sheen of her robes in dazzling
sunlight, and she comes from her tent of glistening, silken, celestial
warp, beaming with tender smiles." "It is a day of days for flatback,
provided the moon is right." But "Billy Ivins swears that the
planetary bodies have nothing to do with fish--it's all confounded
superstition." So they cast in their hooks, "Sutherland's best," and
talk about Harper's Ferry and "old Brown" until one of the party
"thinks he has a nibble" and begs for silence, which at once
supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the
balance. When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes
advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun,
after the manner of a newspaper man, and "Billy Ivins swears he will
kill him for a fool."