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For several days matters went as smoothly as I could have hoped. I found it so easy, when desirable, to switch the colonel on to one of my carefully contrived side tracks that I began to be proud of my skill and to enjoy the exercise of it. But one evening, just as we were in the middle of the dessert, he suddenly broke out with, “We were conquered by mere brute force, you know!”

“That is very true,” I replied. “It is brute force that tells in war. Wasn’t it Napoleon who said that he had remarked that God was generally on the side which had the heaviest artillery?”

“The North had that, fast enough, and crushed a free people with it.”

“A free people with four millions of slaves?” observed Mrs. Wesley quietly.

“Slavery was a patriarchal institution, my dear lady. But I reckon it is exploded now. The Emancipation Proclamation was a dastardly war measure.”

“It did something more and better than free the blacks,” said Mrs. Wesley; “it freed the whites. Dear me!” she added, glancing at Sheridan and Ulysses, who, in a brief reprieve from bed, were over in one corner of the room dissecting a small wooden camel, “I cannot be thankful enough that the children are too young to understand such sentiments.”

The colonel, to my great relief, remained silent; but as soon as Clara had closed the dining-room door behind her, he said, “Tom Wesley, I reckon your wife doesn’t wholly like me.”

“She likes you immensely,” I cried, inwardly begging to be forgiven. “But she is a firm believer in the justice of the Northern cause.”

“May be she lost a brother, or something.”

“No; she never had a brother. If she had had one, he would have been killed in the first battle of the war. She sent me to the front to be killed, and I went willingly; but I wasn’t good enough; the enemy wouldn’t have me at any price after a year’s trial. Mrs. Wesley feels very strongly on this subject, and I wish you would try, like a good fellow, not to bring the question up at dinner-time. I am squarely opposed to your views myself, but I don’t mind what you say as she does. So talk to me as much as you want to, but don’t talk in Clara’s presence. When persons disagree as you two do, argument is useless. Besides, the whole thing has been settled on the battlefield, and it isn’t worth while to fight it all over again on a table-cloth.”

“I suppose it isn’t,” he assented good-naturedly. “But you people up at the North here don’t suspicion what we have been through. You caught only the edge of the hurricane. The most of you, I take it, weren’t in it at all.”

“Our dearest were in it.”

“Well, we got whipped, Wesley, I acknowledge it; but we deserved to win, if ever bravery deserved it.”

“The South was brave, nobody contests that; but ”t is not enough to be brave’–

“‘The angry valor dashed
On the awful shield of God,’

as one of our poets says.”

“Blast one of your poets! Our people were right, too.”

“Come, now, Flagg, when you talk about your people, you ought to mean Northerners, for you were born in the North.”

“That was just the kind of luck that has followed me all my life. My body belongs to Bangor, Maine, and my soul to Charleston, South Carolina.”

“You’ve got a problem there that ought to bother you.”

“It does,” said the colonel, with a laugh.

“Meanwhile, my dear boy, don’t distress Mrs. Wesley with it. She is ready to be very fond of you, if you will let her. It would be altogether sad and shameful if a family so contracted as ours couldn’t get along without internal dissensions.”

My cousin instantly professed the greatest regard for Mrs. Wesley, and declared that both of us were good enough to be Southrons. He promised that in future he would take all the care he could not to run against her prejudices, which merely grew out of her confused conception of State rights and the right of self-government. Women never understood anything about political economy and government, anyhow.