Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist answered for her. "He was a drunken Yankee!" he declared vehemently. When, later, the rubber dam was removed, the aunt protested. "Doctor," she reproved, "you should not have said such a thing to my niece. She is from New York." "Then," returned the unrepentant dentist, "she has heard the truth for once!" Doubtless this man was an inheritor of hate, like the descendants of one uncompromisingly bitter old Southerner whose will, to be seen among the records of the Hanover County courthouse, in Virginia, bequeaths to his "children and grandchildren and their descendants throughout all future generations, the bitter hatred and everlasting malignity of my heart and soul against the Yankees, including all people north of Mason and Dixon's line." CHAPTER XIX "YOU-ALL" AND OTHER SECTIONAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS Let us make an honorable retreat. --AS YOU LIKE IT. Those who write school histories and wish them adopted by southern schools have to handle the Civil War with gloves. Such words as "rebel" and "rebellion" are resented in the South, and the historian must go softly in discussing slavery, though he may put on the loud pedal in speaking of State Rights, the fact being that the South not only knows now, but, as evidenced by the utterances of her leading men, from Jefferson to Lee, knew long before the war that slavery was a great curse; whereas, on the question of State Rights, including the theoretical right to secede from the Union--this being the actual question over which the South took up arms--there is much to be said on the southern side. Colonel Robert Bingham, superintendent of the Bingham School, Asheville, North Carolina, has made an exhaustive study of the question of secession, and has set forth his findings in several scholarly and temperately written booklets.