hospitality eclipsing any people whom the world has known. Porte Crayon, in _Harper’s Magazine_ long before the war, and Thomas Nelson Page, in these later days, have essayed by pencil and pen to set forth the charm of that wonderful hospitality and home life of the Old South. I saw the last of it. With my parole in my pocket, returning homeward through Virginia with other Confederates, hungry and foot-sore, we turned aside from our army-beaten road to a spacious plantation mansion on the crest of a hill, under whose porch sat a lonely old man, the one living creature we could discern. When we asked for bread, he excused himself for a moment on the plea that family and servants were gone, and that he must do our bidding. In a little while he returned with a huge platter of bread and meat, apologizing for a menu so little varied. When we had eaten as only Confederate soldiers could eat and were filled, we took pieces of money from our little store and tendered him in pay. I can never forget the big tears that welled up in the eyes of the old-time Virginian and the flush on his cheeks, as he said: “No, boys; it is the last morsel of food that the enemy has left me. There is not a living creature or an atom of food remaining, but there is not money enough in both armies to tempt my poverty. I’ve kept it up as long as I had it to give.” [Illustration: CONFEDERATE WHITE HOUSE.] Down under all this wealth of fertile field and dusky laborer and palatial home, there was something in which the old-time Southerner took a pride beyond that which he felt in material wealth. His aristocracy of wealth was as nothing compared to his aristocracy of blood. An old family name that had held its place in the social and political annals of his State for generations was a heritage vastly dearer to him than wealth. Back to the gentle-blooded Cavaliers who came to found this Western world, he delighted to trace his ancestry. There could be no higher honor to him than to link his name with the men who had planted the tree of liberty and made possible a great republic. Whatever honors his forbears had won in field or forum, whatever positions of public importance they had graced, he had at his fingers’ ends, and never grew weary of rehearsing. I have nothing but tenderness for this old-time weakness of the Southerner, if weakness it can be called. To glory in one’s blood for centuries past, if only kept pure, to take pride in the linking of one’s name and fame with the history of one’s country, to grow gentler and truer and more self-respecting because of the virtues of a long line of ancestors who have lifted a family name to deserved eminence, has to the writer seemed a noble sentiment. I know how fools have made mock of it, and how silly people in the South have sometimes brought it into contempt; but I set forth in pride and gratitude for the Old South as one of its distinguishing characteristics this devotion to the memory and traditions of its ancestry.