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 now Peter was going to leave him, was going to throw himself away on a lascivious wench. A faint moisture dampened the old man's withered eyes. He drank an extra thimbleful of whisky to try to hearten himself. Its bouquet filled the time-worn stateliness of the dining-room.

During the weeks of Peter's stay at the manor it had grown to be the Captain's habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon, and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.

The old man was writing a book called “Reminiscences of Peace and War.” His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America during the decade of 1908-18. During just that decade it seemed as if the aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave régime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and its vanished deeds.

On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but his reminiscences did not get on. He pinched a bit of floss from the nib of his pen and tried to swing into the period of which he was writing. He read over a few pages of his copy as mental priming, but his thoughts remained flat and dull. Indeed,