and reckon I should have, if that damned war had not taken the money
and the strength out of the old man. But when you are a man, Arthur,
you must work that mine, and you must build up what the war has torn
down. You can buy back and restore, Arthur, and if the South should
get back her rights by that time, as she may, why, then, you can
stock up the old place again, and go on as your father did."

The old man, who was gouty and full of weary chills of body and mind,
used to sit in the sun and dream, to his faint solace, until Arthur
was a grown man and through college, and Anna a young girl at school
near by. The little that had been left, with the bare exception of
the home estate, the plantation, and the mine, had been sold to pay
for Arthur's education. Arthur had been out of college only one
summer when his father died. His mother, whose proud spirit had
fretted the flesh from her bones and drunk up her very blood with
futile rage and repining, had died during the war. Then Arthur, who
had control of everything, as his sister's guardian, set to work to
carry out his father's cherished dream with regard to the coal-mine.
He sold every foot of the estate to a neighboring planter, an old
friend of his father's, at a sacrifice, with a condition attached
that he should have the option of buying it back for cash, at an
advanced price, at the end of five years. The purchaser, who was a
shrewd sort, of Scotch descent, curiously grafted on to an impetuous,
hot-blooded Southern growth, looked at the slim young fellow with his
expression of ingenuous almost fatuous confidence in his
leading-strings of fate, and considered that he was safe enough and
had made a good bargain. He too had suffered from the war, in more
ways than one. He had come out of the strife shorn in his fleece of
worldly wealth and mutilated as to his body. He limped stiffly on a
wooden leg, and his fine buildings had gone up in fire and smoke. But