"If you don't take it off until the South gains her independence, you will have to wear it as long as you live." "Why, father!" exclaimed Mrs. Gray, dropping her sewing into her lap and looking fixedly at her husband, who leaned back in his big chair watching the smoke from his cigar. "How can you bring yourself to utter such treasonable language in your son's hearing? You know you do not believe a word of it." "Never fear for me, mother," said Rodney, with a laugh. "I know where you stand and I am with you." "There was nothing treasonable in what I said, and I do believe every word of it," replied Mr. Gray. "I am as firm a friend to the South as any man in the state, and will make as many sacrifices as the next one to secure her independence. Why shouldn't I? Every thing I've got in the world is right here, and if the South doesn't succeed in her efforts to free herself, we'll be beggars, the last one of us. I wish from the bottom of my heart that when our armies get started they might sweep every abolitionist in the country into Massachusetts Bay; but they'll not be able to do it. The Union has cost the Northern people so much blood and treasure that they will not permit it to be destroyed." "I reckon the South had about as much to do with the war of the Revolution as the North did," declared Rodney. "And another thing, the Northern people will not fight," Mrs. Gray hastened to add. "Wasn't it the South that did the most toward whipping Mexico?" "And wasn't it the North that did the most toward whipping England?" retorted Mr. Gray. "Look here," he added, starting up in his chair when he saw Rodney and his mother look toward each other with a smile of disbelief on their faces. "You must have forgotten your history, you two. During the Revolutionary War the colonies raised two hundred and thirty-two thousand men to fight England, and of this number the North raised one hundred and seventy-five thousand, or more than three-fourths of the whole. Massachusetts gave sixty-eight thousand; Connecticut gave thirty-two thousand; Pennsylvania twenty-six thousand, and New York eighteen thousand; while that miserable little South Carolina gave only six thousand. And yet she has the impudence to talk and act as if she owned the country. It would have been money in her pocket and ours if she had been sunk out of sight in the Atlantic before she was made into a state."