The old Major disapproved, but it was not his way to discuss matters with his family; and it may be doubted, indeed, if the Major grasped the significance and force of the tide which had overtaken his son, as it had rushed with the power of a flood over his beloved Virginia and left in its wake a tremendous unrest, and carried before it many of the most sincere and forceful characters and questions. Beyond a few twittings and an occasional growl, therefore, the old Major had ignored his son's gradual withdrawal from the ancient forms and functions and the fact that almost every Sunday morning, of late, had found the boy absent from the family pew and present two miles up the valley at the little log meeting-house of the Methodists. He was unprepared, therefore, to face the question seriously, when finally told by the boy's mother that Grif had decided that on his nineteenth birthday he would be baptized, and that he intended to enter the ministry as a circuit rider. The joke struck the Major as good above the average. He laughed long and loud. He chuckled within himself all day. When evening came and Griffith appeared at the table the Major was too full of mirth and derision to content himself with his usual banter. "Your mothah inforhms me," he began with the ironical touch in his tone held well under the sparkle of humor. "Your mothah inforhms me that to-morrow is your nineteenth birthday, you long-legged young gosling, and that you contemplate celebrating it by transmuting yourself into a Methodist ass with leather lungs and the manners, sir,--and the habits, sir, of--of--of a damned Yankee!" As the Major had halted for words and the picture of his son as a circuit rider arose before him as a reality and not as a joke, his ire had gotten the better of his humor. The picture he had conjured up in his own mind of this son of his in the new social relations sure to result from the contemplated change of faith swamped the old Major's sense of the absurdity of the situation in a sudden feeling of indignation and chagrin, and the sound of his own unusual words did the rest. Griffith looked up at his father in blank surprise. His mother said, gently, "Majah! Majah!" But the old 'squire's sudden plunge into anger had him in its grip. He grew more and more excited as his own words stirred him.