How the Major, a second Rip Van Winkle, found his way to New York, and to the pier of the incoming French Line steamer, must always remain a mystery. But he was there, with the fierce old eyes quenched and swimming and the passionate Dabney lips trembling strangely under the great mustaches, when the black-frocked little waif from the Old World ran down the landing stage and into his arms. Small wonder that they clung to each other, these two at the further extremes of three generations; or that the child opened a door in the heart of the fierce old partizan which was locked and doubly barred against all others. As may be imagined, the Major got away from Yankeeland with his charge as soon as a train could be made to serve; and he was grim and forbidding to all and sundry until the Cumberland Mountains had displaced the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge on the western horizon. Indeed, the grimness,--to all save Ardea,--persisted quite to and through the transformed and transforming city at the eastern foot of Lebanon. Major Caspar was not in tune with the bravura of modern progress, and if he had been, his hatred of Northern importations of whatever nature would have made and kept him hostile. But when the ancient carriage, with Scipio and Ardea's one small steamer trunk on the box, had topped the shrugged shoulder of Lebanon, and that view which we have seen from the summit of Thomas Jefferson's high rock among the cedars opened out before the eyes of the wondering child, the Major grew eloquent. "Look youh fill, my deah child; thah it lies--God's country, and youh's and mine; the fines', the most inspiring, the most beautiful land the sun eveh shone on! And whilst you are givin' praise to youh Makeh for creatin' such a Gyarden of Eden, don't forget to thank him on youh bended knees for not putting anything oveh yondeh in ouh home lot to tempt these house-buildin', money-makin', schemin' Yankees that are swarming again oveh the land like anotheh plague of Egyptian locus'es." "These--Yankees?" queried Ardea. In his later years the exiled Captain Louis had remembered only that he was an American, and his child knew no North nor South. The Major did not explain. Not that there were any compunctions of conscience concerning the planting of the seed of sectionalism in this virgin soil, quite the contrary. He abstained because he made sure that time, and the Dabney blood, would do it better. So he talked to the small one of safely prehistoric things, showing her the high mountain battle-field where John Sevier had broken the power of the savage Chickamaugas, and, as the carriage rolled down toward the head of Paradise, the tract of land where the first Dabney had sent his ax-men to blaze the trees for his lordly boundaries.