When the Colonel said “the State of Virginia,” he really meant the whole planetary system. Nevertheless, two weeks in his beloved Virginia had bored him dreadfully, and he was “more orkarder,” as Petrarch expressed it, than any other two weeks of his whole life. The Campdown races he hailed as a godsend. He had a good competence left, in spite of having sent orders to his agents to convert lands, stocks, bonds, and everything, into Confederate securities--cotton bonds, Confederate gunboat stock, anything in which the State of Virginia was bound up. As far as in him lay, he had made ducks and drakes of a splendid fortune, from the finest and most disinterested motives that ever inspired a mistaken old gentleman, but fate had befriended him against his will. An investment at the North that the colonel had vainly tried to throw in the general wreck, had escaped confiscation, and had increased, a hundredfold in value. His orders to sell half of Isleham, his family place, for Confederate money, had arrived too late for his agent to carry it out. He had done the handsome thing, as it was esteemed, and after having practiced the strictest virtue, he was rewarded with all the pleasures that are commonly supposed to be the reward of vice. “Don’t you think, papa,” the young girl said to him at once, “that we should go up on the grand stand? It might look a little--a little standoffish for us to remain here--and the county people--” The Virginians inherit from their English ancestry, a vast and preposterous respect for their county people--and Miss Olivia Berkeley, fresh from Paris and London, was more anxious that no fault should be found with her by these out-of-the-way provincials than any of the fine people she had met during a considerable transatlantic experience. So was Colonel Berkeley--but there was a fly in his ointment. “I would with pleasure, my love, but damme if those Hibbses are not sitting up on the stand along with their betters--and I won’t rub elbows with the Hibbses. It’s everywhere the same. Society is so infernally mixed now that I am always expecting to meet my tailor at dinner. I thought certainly, in old Virginia, the people would know how to keep the canaille in their places, and there, by George, sits a family like the Hibbses staring me in the face.” “Yes,” replied Olivia, smiling. “It’s everywhere the same--you are bound to meet some of the Hibbses everywhere in the world--so we might as well do the right thing in spite of them. Petrarch, open the carriage door.” The Colonel, with old-fashioned gallantry, assisted his daughter to alight, and giving her his arm, they crossed the track in full view of the grand stand, and went up the rickety wooden stairs at the end.