“’Bout de same, honey, des ’bout de same. I is saw ’um mo’ ’rageous; an’ ergin, I is saw ’um less ’rageous. ’Bout so an’ so, honey. Des ’bout so an’ so, Miss Ginnie, chile.” “You say there’s some one with him; are they inside the house?” Uncle Vete grinned, and twisted in his seat. “Yas, honey,” he admitted, finally. “Dey bofe inside de house, an’ de fambly, dey on de outside. Dat whut mek me come fer you dis time er night.” “Do you mean that they turned you out?” “Yas, honey. I foun’ Cindy an’ de chillen all turn’t out an’ blockaded, an’ young Marse a shootin’ th’oo de do’ ef anybody speak ter ’im.” Virginia leaned back in silence. The crazy old vehicle creaked and rattled over the rough road. Its one sorry horse made slow progress. Fairfax Sevier, less than two years older than his sister, Virginia, was a handsome, brilliant, lovable young fellow, endeared to her by the same qualities and the same odd unexpected little lapses and weak spots which endlessly charmed and perplexed her in her father. The general was a peculiarly high-minded, honorable man, with all in his character that makes for good citizenship. He had brought through a youth which was not without its little scattered patches of wild oats, and a famously dare-devil military career during the Civil War, an unpollutable vein of childlike innocency. It was not that he failed to see evil, or to know it and understand it. But he saw and knew these things as a child does, intelligent, but unsoiled. His most marked characteristic was a determined disposition to meddle with the affairs of no human creature, to refuse authority, because it implied responsibility; to let—as he felicitously phrased it—every fellow go to the devil his own gait. This trait made him, among his children, always more a brother than a parent, and was most amusingly displayed during their infancy and childhood. He would stand aloof from a small offender who was weltering defiantly in infantile crime. Bending his handsome head, he would look from his very considerable height down to the little sinner before him, and addressing it in the most confidential tone of perfect equality, remark: “You’re making a pretty mess of things there; now, aren’t you? Think you want to bust that, do you? Do you know, you’re going to be mighty sorry when you get done this business? And like enough your mother’ll spank you, too.”