“You’ll have to change cars soon at Perry’s Junction for Ocala; it isn’t much of a place, but you’ll have to sleep there, and in the morning take the cars for Silver Springs, about half an hour’s ride.” He then emerged from his official character and added, “Perhaps you’ll be going back to England soon? Yes? Well, I should like to give you my father’s address.” He fumbled through a tattered pocket-book, and extracted therefrom a crumpled piece of paper. “There, if you should ever be in that neighbourhood I hope you’ll just give a call on my folks; they’ll make you right welcome, and please tell ’em I’m all right, and I hope to be home next fall.” I took the paper, but knowing that my chance of making the acquaintance of his esteemed parents was small I ventured to suggest that he would most likely forward that information himself. “No,” he answered, “I’m not much of a hand with a pen; somehow we get out of the way of it in these parts. I haven’t written to the old folk for years, though I think of them often enough--God bless ’em! I often picture to myself how they’ll look when I first walk in upon ’em.” “Take you for a tramp, most likely, and shut the door in your face,” I suggest, somewhat flippantly, perhaps; but he answered gravely: “Father might, but mother ’ll know me, sure enough, though I left home at fourteen years old and I’m now thirty. But _she’d_ know me, ay, even if I was in my coffin. And I should know her dear old face, even if we don’t meet till we meet in heaven.” We were constantly beset by similar inquiries from perfect strangers; the fact of our nationality once ascertained, somebody would accost us--on the cars, the platform, the hotel corridors, no matter where. “Excuse me, but do you know my cousin, the Rev. Jonah Smith, a clergyman, curate of St. Jeremiah’s, somewhere down in Cumberland, the place where my grandfather came from?” Everybody seemed to think we _must_ know their relations--sometimes we found it very difficult to convince them to the contrary. Once I received a long letter, filling several sheets of foolscap, as long as a lawyer’s long brief, setting forth a whole family history up to a certain period, marriages and intermarriages, beseeching me to set inquiries on foot and transmit to them any information I could gather concerning their English relations, with whom they, the American branch, had held no communication for the last generation. To me there is something touching in this desire to claim kinship with the old family tree, whose branches are flourishing in all quarters of the habitable globe. It is so everywhere in the conservative South. In the more cosmopolitan north it is different; as a rule nobody cares to claim kinship with anybody or anything, except perhaps Wall Street and the money market.