whatever nature would have made and kept him hostile.

But when the ancient carriage, with Scipio and Ardea's one small steamer
trunk on the box, had topped the shrugged shoulder of Lebanon, and that
view which we have seen from the summit of Thomas Jefferson's high rock
among the cedars opened out before the eyes of the wondering child, the
Major grew eloquent.

"Look youh fill, my deah child; thah it lies--God's country, and youh's
and mine; the fines', the most inspiring, the most beautiful land the
sun eveh shone on! And whilst you are givin' praise to youh Makeh for
creatin' such a Gyarden of Eden, don't forget to thank him on youh
bended knees for not putting anything oveh yondeh in ouh home lot to
tempt these house-buildin', money-makin', schemin' Yankees that are
swarming again oveh the land like anotheh plague of Egyptian locus'es."

"These--Yankees?" queried Ardea. In his later years the exiled Captain
Louis had remembered only that he was an American, and his child knew no
North nor South.

The Major did not explain. Not that there were any compunctions of
conscience concerning the planting of the seed of sectionalism in this
virgin soil, quite the contrary. He abstained because he made sure that
time, and the Dabney blood, would do it better.

So he talked to the small one of safely prehistoric things, showing her
the high mountain battle-field where John Sevier had broken the power of
the savage Chickamaugas, and, as the carriage rolled down toward the
head of Paradise, the tract of land where the first Dabney had sent his
ax-men to blaze the trees for his lordly boundaries.