“Don’t be an ass!” the colonel pleaded; and then observed, inconsequently:  “I can’t somehow quite realize Aline is dead.  Lord, Lord, the letters that I wrote to her!  She sent them all back, you know, in genuine romantic fashion, after we had quarreled.  I found those boyish ravings only the other day in my father’s desk at Matocton, and skimmed them over.  I shall read them through some day and appropriately meditate over life’s mysteries that are too sad for tears.”

He meditated now.

“It wouldn’t be quite equitable, Jack,” the colonel summed it up, “if the Aline I loved—­no, I don’t mean the real woman, the one you and all the other people knew, the one that married the enterprising brewer and died five years ago—­were not waiting for me somewhere.  I can’t express just what I mean, but you will understand, I know—?”

“That heaven is necessarily run on a Mohammedan basis?  Why, of course,” said Mr. Charteris.  “Heaven, as I apprehend it, is a place where we shall live eternally among those ladies of old years who never condescended actually to inhabit any realm more tangible than that of our boyish fancies.  It is the obvious definition; and I defy you to evolve a more enticing allurement toward becoming a deacon.”

“You romancers are privileged to talk nonsense anywhere,” the colonel estimated, “and I suppose that in the Lichfield you have made famous, Jack, you have a double right.”

“Ah, but I never wrote a line concerning Lichfield.  I only wrote about the Lichfield whose existence you continue to believe in, in spite of the fact that you are actually living in the real Lichfield,” Charteris returned.  “The vitality of the legend is wonderful.”

He cocked his head to one side—­an habitual gesture with Charteris—­and the colonel noted, as he had often done before, how extraordinarily reminiscent Jack was of a dried-up, quizzical black parrot.  Said Charteris: 

“I love to serve that legend.  I love to prattle of ‘ole Marster’ and ‘ole Miss,’ and throw in a sprinkling of ‘mockin’-buds’ and ‘hants’ and ‘horg-killing time,’ and of sweeping animadversions as to all ’free niggers’; and to narrate how ’de quality use ter cum’—­you spell it c-u-m because that looks so convincingly like dialect—­’ter de gret hous.’  Those are the main ingredients.  And, as for the unavoidable love-interest—­” Charteris paused, grinned, and pleasantly resumed:  “Why, jes arter dat, suh, a hut Yankee cap’en, whar some uv our folks done shoot in de laig, wuz lef on de road fer daid—­a quite notorious custom on the part of all Northern armies—­un Young Miss had him fotch up ter de gret hous, un nuss im same’s he one uv de fambly, un dem two jes fit un argufy scanlous un never spicion huccum dey’s in love wid each othuh till de War’s ovuh.  And there you are!  I need not mention that during the tale’s progress it is necessary to introduce at least one favorable mention of Lincoln, arrange a duel ‘in de low grouns’ immediately after day-break, and have the family silver interred in the back garden, because these points will naturally suggest themselves.”