The Old South, in itself and apart from all other considerations, will always be a profitable study. It is the one unique page of our national history. Indeed, it comprehends two hundred and fifty years of history with scarce a parallel. I think one will search in vain history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South, socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. Wherein especially was it unique? To begin with, it was in the South rather than the North that the seed of American liberty was first planted. Jamestown, not Plymouth Rock, was the matrix of true Americanism. Poet and orator have made much of the rock-bound coast and savage wild to which the Puritan fathers came, and have had little to say of the Cavaliers who fought their way to conquest over savage beast and man. Winthrop, Standish, and Cotton Mather are set forth by provincial and partisan writer and speaker as exclusive national types of pioneer courage, wisdom, and heroism. I have read more than one sneer in alleged national histories against “the gentlemen of Jamestown,” of whom it was said that there were “eleven laboring men and thirty-five gentlemen.” But the historians who sneer fail to note how these same gentlemen felled more trees and did more hard work than the men of the ax and pick. Long after Jamestown had become a memory, I had seen the descendants of those same derided gentlemen in the Army of Northern Virginia, possessors of inherited wealth and reared to luxury from their cradles, yet toiling in the trenches or tramping on the dusty highway or charging into the mouth of cannon with unfailing cheerfulness. I do not disparage the stern integrity and high achievement of the Puritan sires. I gladly accord them a high place among the fathers and founders of the republic. But putting Puritan and Cavalier side by side, rating each fairly at his real worth and by what he did to fix permanently the qualities that have made us great, I am confident I could make good my proposition that deeper down at the foundation of our greatness as a people than all other influences are the qualities and spirit that have marked the Cavalier in the Old World or the New. [Illustration: AUNT HANNAH.]