“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our fine manners!” he begged comically. “We’ve satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my aunt just now--well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because I’m of the new generation, since the war, and--well, I’ve been to other places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can’t see it. And I wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t ever attempt to explain to them that the world has to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t see the necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a clock. Their hand points to 1865--it has never moved a minute since. And some day”--his voice grew suddenly tender--“they’ll go, one by one, to join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much.” For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving. Then I said: “May I say that I shall miss them, too?” He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port people?” He didn’t invite outsiders to do that! “Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured. “It was the same thing once with us.” “The same thing--in the North?” His tone still held me off. “The same sort of dear old people--I mean charming, peppery, refined, courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.” And, as certain beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: “If you knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of Kings Port.” “But politics?” the young Southerner slowly suggested.