Sylvia had set out some months ago at the task of democratizing van Tuiver; even in becoming engaged she had kept some lingering hope of accomplishing this. But alas, how quickly the idea vanished before the reality of her situation! She remembered with a smile how glibly she had advised the young millionaire to step away from his shadow; and how he had labored to make plain to her that he could not help being a King. Now suddenly she found that she could sympathize with him—she who was about to be a Queen! There were a thousand little ways in which she felt the difference. Even the manner of her friends was changed. She could not go anywhere that she was not conscious of people staring at her. It was found necessary to appoint a negro to guard the grounds, because of the number of strangers who came in the hope of getting a glimpse of her. Her mail became suddenly a flood: letters from inventors who wished to make her another fortune; letters from distressed women who implored her to save them; letters from convicts languishing in prison for crimes of which they were innocent; letters from poets with immortal, unrecognized blank-verse dramas; letters from lonely farmers’ wives who thrilled over her romance, and poured out their souls in ill-spelled blessings; letters from prophets of the class-war who frightened her with warnings of the wrath to come! On the second day after the engagement was announced, Sylvia went out, all unsuspecting, for a horseback-ride, and had hardly mounted when a man with a black box stepped from behind a tree, and proceeded calmly to snap-shot the fair equestrienne. Sylvia cried out in indignation, and springing from the horse, rushed in to tell the Major what had happened; whereupon the Major sallied out with a cane, and there was a cross-country gallop after the intruder, ending in a violent collision between the camera and the cane. The funniest part of the matter was that the photographer spent the better part of a day trying to get a warrant for his assailant—imagining that it was possible to arrest a Castleman in Castleman County! By way of revenge he telegraphed the story to New York, where it appeared, duly worked up—with the old photograph of the “reigning beauty of the New South,” in place of the one which had died in the camera! § 21 Sylvia came up to New York in due course; and by the time that she had been there one day, she was able to understand the fondness of the great for traveling “incog.” She was “snapped” when she descended from the train—and this time there was no one to assault the photographer. Coming out of her hotel with van Tuiver she found a battery of cameras waiting; and being ungracious enough to put up her hand before her face, she beheld her picture the next morning with the hand held up, and beside it the “reigning beauty” picture—with the caption, “What is behind the hand!”