The top of this tree may have been lowered a little by the burnin’ fires of war, but the deep roots remain; and as time and a false sense of security relaxes the watch kept over it, the poison shoots spring up and the land is plagued by its thorny branches, its impassable, thick undergrowth. The tree may be felled to the earth before it springs up agin with a more dangerous, vigorous growth and destroys the hull nation. So Cousin John Richard said; but I don’t know whether it will or not, and Josiah don’t. But I am a eppisodin’, and to resoom and continue on. Reginald Seybert wuz tolerably good-lookin’ in an aggressive, florid style, and he had plenty of boldness and wealth. And some, or all of these qualities, made it possible for him to marry a good woman of an impoverished but aristocratic Southern family. The marriage wuz a sudden one—he did not give the young lady time to change her mind. He met her at a fashionable watering-place where they wuz both strangers, and, as I said, he give her no time to repent her choice. After the honeymoon trip and her husband brought her to his home, she heard many strange things she had been kept in ignorance of—amongst them this pitiful story of Victor and his mother—and being what she wuz, a good, tender-hearted woman, with high ideals and pure and charitable impulses—perhaps it wuz this that made her so good to Victor’s mother, so thoughtful and considerate of him, and that made her, during her husband’s long absences on his wild sprees, give him every benefit of teachers and opportunity to study. And Victor almost worshipped his gentle mistress, his unhappy mistress, for it could not be otherwise, that after she knew him well, her feelin’s for her husband could hardly have been stronger than pity. Perhaps after a time aversion and disgust crept in, and as she had no children or brothers of her own, she grew strongly attached to Phyllis and to Victor, the only relative—for so this strange woman called him in her thoughts—the only relative near her who wuz kind to her. For as her beauty faded, worn away by the anguished, feverish beatings of a sad heart, Col. Seybert grew cruel and brutal to her also. It was not in his nature to be kind to anything, or to value anything that did not minister to his selfishness. He lived only for the gratification of his appetites and his ambition. He prized Victor, as we said, as a manufacturer would prize an extra good loom, on which valuable cloth might be woven, and which would bear any amount of extra pressure on occasion. Victor’s loyal affection and gratitude to his mistress, and his determination to shield her all he could from her husband’s brutality, and his love for his mother, made him conceal from them all he could the fiendish cruelties his master sometimes inflicted upon him.