Ravenel never let his paper theorize on the causes of Suez's renown or the _Courier's_ vogue. "It's the luck of the times," he said, and pleasantly smiled to see the nation's eyes turned on Dixie and her near sisters, hardly in faith, yet with a certain highly commercial hope and charity. The lighting of every new coke furnace, the setting fire to any local rubbish-heap of dead traditions, seemed just then to Northern longings the blush of a new economic and political dawn over the whole South. "You say you're going South? Well, now if you want to see a very small but most encouraging example of the changes going on down there, just stop over a day in Suez!" Such remarks were common--in the clubs--in the cars. "Now, for instance, Suez! I know something of Suez myself." So said a certain railway passenger one day when this fame had entered its second year and the more knowing journals had begun to neglect it. "I was an officer in the Union army and was left down there on duty after the surrender a short while; then I went out West and fought Indians. But Suez--I pledge you my word I wouldn't 'a' given a horseshoe-nail for the whole layout! Now!--well, you'd e'en a'most think you was in a Western town! The way they're a slappin' money, b' Jinks, into improvements and enterprises--quarries, roads, bridges, schools, mills--'twould make a Western town's head swim!" "What kind of mills?" asked his listener, a young man, but careworn. "O, eh, saw-mills--tanbark mills--to start with. Was you ever there?" "Yes, I--before the changes you speak of I----" "Before! Hoh! then you've never seen Lover's Leap coal mine, or Bridal Veil coal mine, or Sleeping Giant iron mine, or Devil's Garden coke furnaces! They're putting up smelting works right opposite the steamboat landing! You say you're going South--just stop over a day in Suez. It'll pay you! You could write it up!--call it 'What a man just back f'm Europe saw in Dixie'--only, you don't want to wave the Bloody Shirt, and don't forget we're dead tired hearing about the 'illiterate South.' _I_ say, let us have peace; my son's in love with a Southern girl! Why, at Suez you'll see school-houses only five miles apart, from Wildcat Ridge--where the niggers and mountaineers had that skirmish last fall--clean down to Leggettstown! School-houses, why,"--the speaker chuckled at what was coming--"one of 'em stands on the very spot where in '65 I found a little freckled boy trying to poke a rabbit out of a log with an old bayon----" "No!" exclaimed the careworn listener, in one smile from his hat to his handsome boots.