We call this a narrow life, prate in the North of our sympathy with the universal man, don't we? And so we extend a stomachic greeting to our Spanish brother that sends us wine, and a bow from our organ of ideality to Italy for beauty incarnate in Art,--see the Georgian slaveholder only through the eyes of the cowed negro at his feet, and give a dime on Sunday to send the gospel to the heathen, who will burn forever, we think, if it never is preached to them. What of your sympathy with the universal man, when I tell you Scofield was a Rebel? His syllogisms on this point were clear, to himself. For slavery to exist in a country where free government was put on trial was a tangible lie, that had worked a moral divorce between North and South. Slavery was the vital breath of the South; if she chose to go out and keep it, had not freemen the right to choose their own government? To bring her back by carnage was simply the old game of regal tyranny on republican cards. So his head settled it: as for his heart,--his neighbors' houses were in ashes, burned by the Yankees; his son lay dead at Manassas. He died to keep them back, didn't he? "Geordy boy," he used to call him,--worth a dozen puling girls: since he died, the old man had never named his name. Scofield was a Rebel in every bitter drop of his heart's blood. He hurried to the house to prepare to go to the Union meeting. He had a reason for going. The Federal troops held Romney then, a neighboring village, and he knew many of the officers would be at this meeting. There was a party of Confederates in Blue's Gap, a mountain-fastness near by, and Scofield had heard a rumor that the Unionists would attack them to-morrow morning: he meant to try and find out the truth of it, so as to give the boys warning to be ready, and, maybe, lend them a helping hand. Only for Dode's sake, he would have been in the army long ago. He stopped on the porch to clean his shoes, for the floor was newly scrubbed, and Miss Scofield was a tidy housekeeper, and had, besides, a temper as hot and ready to light as her father's pipe. The old man stopped now, half chuckling, peeping in at the window to see if all was clear within. But you must not think for this that Dode's temper was the bugbear of the house,--though the girl herself thought it was, and shed some of the bitterest tears of her life over it. Just a feverish blaze in the blood, caught from some old dead grandfather, that burst out now and then.