... Immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield. --PARADISE LOST. The last time I went abroad, a Briton on the boat told me a story about an American tourist who asked an old English gardener how they made such splendid lawns over there. "First we cut the grass," said the gardener, "and then we roll it. Then we cut it, and then we roll it." "That's just what we do," said the American. "Ah," returned the gardener, "but over here we've been doing it five hundred years!" In Liverpool another Englishman told me the same story. Three or four others told it to me in London. In Kent I heard it twice, and in Sussex five or six times. After going to Oxford and the Thames I lost count. In the South my companion and I had a similar experience with the story about that daughter of the Confederacy who declared she had always thought "damn Yankee" one word. In Maryland that story amused us, in Virginia it seemed to lose a little of its edge, and we are proud to this day because, in the far southern States, we managed to grin and bear it. Doubtless the young lady likewise thought that "you-all" was one word. However I refrained from suggesting that, lest it be taken for an attempt at retaliation. And really there was no occasion to retaliate, for the story was always told with good-humored appreciation not only of the dig at "Yankees"--collectively all Northerners are "Yankees" in the South--but also of the sweet absurdity of the "unreconstructed" point of view. Speaking broadly of the South, I believe that there survives little real bitterness over the Civil War and the destructive and grotesquely named period of "reconstruction." When a southern belle of to-day damns Yankees, she means by it, I judge, about as much, and about as little, as she does by the kisses she gives young men who bear to her the felicitous southern relationship of "kissing cousins." Even from old Confederate soldiers I heard no expressions of violent feeling. They spoke gently, handsomely and often humorously of the war, but never harshly. Real hate, I think, remains chiefly in one quarter: in the hearts of some old ladies, the wives and widows of Confederate soldiers--for there are but few mothers of the soldiers left. The wonder is that more of the old ladies of the South have not held to their resentment, for, as I have heard many a soldier say, women are the greatest sufferers from war. One veteran said to me: "My arm was shattered and had to be amputated at the shoulder. There was no anesthetic. Of course I suffered, but I never suffered as my mother did when she learned what I had endured."