The Long Roll

the speakers. One by one, they stepped into the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty, such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense

tigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong-all these are in the bosom of that cloud!-The Sovereignty of the State. Where is the tempest which threatens here? Not here, Virginians! but in the pleasing assertion of the North, 'There is no sovereignty of the State!' 'A State is merely to the Union what a county is to a State.' O shades of John Randolph of Roanoke, of Patrick Henry, of Mason and Madison, of Washington and Jefferson! O shade of John Marshall even, whom we used to think too Federal! The Union! We thought of the Union as a golden thread-at the most we thought of it as a strong servant we had made between us, we thirteen artificers-a beautiful Talus to walk our coasts and cry 'All's well!' We thought so-by the gods, we think so yet! That is our Union-the golden thr

rom the portico, he made out the broad shoulders, the waving dark hair, and the slouch hat of a young man with whom he was used to discuss these questions. Hairston Breckinridge glanced down at the pressure u

nion," said Allan. "I can't help i

red in the word Union that men should bow down and worship it! It's the thing behind the word that counts-and whoever says that Massachusetts and Vir

is

he army, home on furlough.-Old-line Whig. I've be

o more than others, are free from vanity, and we think we know a hero by intuition. Men of Botet

, and began to speak in an odd, dry, attractive voice. "You are too good!" he said clearly. "I'm afraid you don't know Fauquier Cary very well, after all. He's no hero

pultepec?"-"And the Rio Grande?"-"Didn't

's soldier, and that, in its way, is as fine a thing as a poet's poet! I see men before me who are of the blood of the Lees. Out there by the Rio Grande is a Colonel Robert E. Lee, of whom Virginia may well be proud! There are few heights in those western deserts, but he carries his height with him. He's marked for greatness. And there are 'Beauty' Stuart, and Dabney Maury, the best of fellows, and Edward Dillon, and Walker and George Thomas, and many another good man and true. First and last, there's a deal of old Virginia following Mars, out yonder! We've got Hardee, too, from Georgia, and Van Dorn from Mississippi, and Albert S

or a moment their long, clean line, then dropped his glance and spoke in a changed

Comanches, with wolves and with grizzlies, but that we are not-oh, we are not-ready to fight with each other! Brother against brother-comrade against

South Carolina go in peace! It is her right! Remembering old comradeship, old battlefields, old defeats, old victories, we shall still be friends. If the Gulf States go, still it is their right, immemorial, incontrovertible!-The right of self-government. We are of one blood and the country is wide. God-speed both to Lot and to Abraham! On some sunny future day may their children draw together and take hands again! So mu

nd the makers of it-for a peaceful solution of all troubles. As for the army, county and State were proud of the army, and proud of the Virginians within it. It was amid cheering that Fauquier Cary left the portico. A

iously minded, unite for the sweetness of Union and for the furtherance of common interests. When the minds are discordant, and the interests opposed, one may be bound to another by Conquest-not otherwise! What said Hamilton? To coerce a State would be one of the maddest projects ever devised!" He descended the court house steps to the grassy, cr

remember! We had a merry Christmas! I am glad to mee

Allan Gold, fro

llan. "You have been saying what I shou

are pleased. Are you, t

go. I teach the sch

nridge, "than many of us who are at the

final sentence; the town band crashed in determinedly with "Home, Sweet Home." To its closing strains the county people, afoot, on horseback, in old, roomy, high-swung carriages, took this road and that. The townsfolk, still excite

d side by side until their roads diverged. The miller was a slow man, but to-day there was a red in his cheek and a

e do you suppose is really about the negro? I was bro

of us. You d

N

gesses used to try to stop the bringing in of negroes, and that the Colony was always appealing to the king against the traffic. He said that in 1778, two years after Virginia declared her Independence, she passed the statute prohibiting the slave trade. He said that she was the first country in the civilized world to stop the trade-passed her statute thirty years before England! He said that all our great Revolutionary men hated slavery and worked for the emancipation of the negroes who were here; that men worked openly and hard for it until 1832. Then came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those women and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall Abolition people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on like grim death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where the explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking,

ight way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned, lovable, never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole, way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and King George saddled

"People mean well, and yet there's such

ir own country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it to them-even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You couldn't scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help them back to their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for instance-never see one that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three Oaks,-he'd say he couldn't p

, rose the shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded.

l and vale, forest and stream. The afterglow was upon the land. He looked at the mountains, the great mountains, long and clean of line as the marching rollers of a giant sea, not split or jagged, but even, unbroken, and old, old, the oldest almost in the world. Now the ancient forest clothed them, while they were given, by som

e the sound of a bell. Allan straightened himself, li

the man with

y to the zenith. The young man drew a long br

d the valleys between. Allan Gold, coming down the hill, became aware, first of a horse fastened to a wayside sapling, then of a man seated upon the fallen oak, his back to the road, his face to the darkening prospect. Below him the winter wind made a rustling in the dead leaves. Evidently another had paused to admire the view, or to collect and m

"I trust in God that's not true!-It

him, he sprang lightly down to the roadside, where he proceeded to brush dead leaf and bark from his clothing with an old gauntlet. When he spoke it was still in the same moved, vibrating voice. "War's my métier. That'

m at the bottom doesn't want it. War is a word that means agony to many and a set-back to all. Reason tells me that, and my heart wishe

p-chested, broad-shouldered, looked larger than life. "I don't talk this way often-as you'll grant!"

be a long war, could it? After the fir

knows! In the past it has been that the more eq

saddle. The horse, a magnificent bay, took the road, and the three began the long descent. It was very co

the woods. Perhaps, all the way behind us, I was a hunter, with a taste for books! My grandfather was a scout in the Re

o," said Cleave.

time; then said the first, "I shall ride to La

are cousins,

mother was a Dandrid

wine and blue steel and a

and fine, in m

s not w

N

ty at all-he'll only say what he said to-day, that every one sh

ears a uniform.

the branches of the trees the sky showed intense and cold, the crescent moon, above a bla

they do, all the Virginians in the army-Lee and Jo

ll com

their com

their com

would be a hard th

o it. Woul

valley and the household lamps up to the marching

she'll try to reinforce it. That will be the beginning of the end. South Carolina will reduce the fort. The North will preach a holy war. War there will be-whether holy or not remains

a short l

ter State than any will be forced into secession! A

al air the mountain walls seemed near at hand, above shone Orion, icily brilliant. The lawyer from a dim old hous

s that Major Cary's niece

Judith

beautiful on

ul-the three Greenwood Carys. Bu

s he did so he lifted his wid

Allan presently, "that an

bay. There was yet upon the road a faint after-light-enough light to reveal that

iped the moisture away. "Gay!" he repeated. "I'm not gay. What gave you such a