How largely Mr. Robert's high spirits were the result of rapid riding on a good horse, and how far other causes aided in producing them, I am wholly unprepared to say. Whatever their cause was they were not destined to last long after he dismounted at The Oaks. Indeed his day at that country seat was not at all an agreeable one. His cousin Sarah Ann was a rather depressing person to be with at any time, and there were circumstances which made her especially so on this particular occasion. Cousin Sarah Ann had a chronic habit of being ostentatiously sorry for herself, which was very disagreeable to a healthy young man like Robert. She nursed and cherished her griefs as if they had been her children, and like children they grew under the process. She had several times told Robert how lonely she was since the death of her mother, three years before, and with tears in her eyes she had complained that there was nobody to love her now that poor mother was gone--a statement which right-thinking and logical Robert felt himself almost guilty in hearing from a woman with a husband and a house full of children. She complained a good deal of her poverty, too, a complaining which shocked this truthful young man, knowing, as he did, that his cousin Edwin was one of the wealthiest men in the country round about, with a good plantation at home, a very large and profitable one in Mississippi, twenty or thirty business buildings, well leased, in Richmond, a surplus of money in bank, and no debts whatever, which last circumstance served to make him almost a curiosity in a state in which it was hardly respectable to owe no money. She complained, too, that her boys were dull and her girls not pretty, both of which complaints were very well founded indeed. When Robert on his first visit said something in praise of her comfortable and really pretty house, she replied: "Oh! I can't pretend to live in an aristocratic house like your Aunt Mary's. I didn't inherit a 'family mansion' you know, and so we had to build this house. It hasn't a bit of wainscoting, you see, and no old pictures. I reckon I a'n't as good as you Pagebrooks, and somehow my husband a'n't as aristocratic as the rest of you. I reckon he's only a half-blood Pagebrook, and that's why he condescended to marry poor me." This was Cousin Sarah Ann's favorite way of speaking of herself, and she said "poor me" with a degree of pathos in her tone which always brought tears to her eyes. On the present occasion, as I have said, there were circumstances which enabled this estimable lady to make herself unusually disagreeable. She had a fresh affliction, and so she reveled in an ecstasy of woe. It was her ambition in life to be exceptionally miserable, and accordingly she welcomed sorrow with a keenness of relish which few people can possibly know. She wouldn't be happy in heaven, Billy Barksdale said, unless she could convince people there that she was snubbed by the saints and put upon by the angels.