one asset with which to accumulate a little liquid capital; he possessed
a fine peach orchard, which was particularly productive in the summer of
1865, and the Northern soldiers, who drew their pay in money that had
real value, developed a weakness for the fruit. Walter Page, a boy of
ten, used to take his peaches to Raleigh, and sell them to the
"invader"; although he still disdained having companionable relations
with the enemy, he was not above meeting them on a business footing; and
the greenbacks and silver coin obtained in this way laid a new basis for
the family fortunes.

Despite this happy windfall, life for the next few years proved an
arduous affair. The horrors of reconstruction which followed the war
were more agonizing than the war itself. Page's keenest enthusiasm in
after life was democracy, in its several manifestations; but the form in
which democracy first unrolled before his astonished eyes was a phase
that could hardly inspire much enthusiasm. Misguided sentimentalists and
more malicious politicians in the North had suddenly endowed the Negro
with the ballot. In practically all Southern States that meant
government by Negroes--or what was even worse, government by a
combination of Negroes and the most vicious white elements, including
that which was native to the soil and that which had imported itself
from the North for this particular purpose. Thus the political
vocabulary of Page's formative years consisted chiefly of such words as
"scalawag," "carpet bagger," "regulator," "Union League," "Ku Klux
Klan," and the like. The resulting confusion, political, social, and
economic, did not completely amount to the destruction of a
civilization, for underneath it all the old sleepy ante-bellum South
still maintained its existence almost unchanged. The two most
conspicuous and contrasting figures were the Confederate veteran walking
around in a sleeveless coat and the sharp-featured New England school