As a matter of fact, however, Jack was not insensible to the awkward complication of his predicament.  Grief as a mantle is difficult to adjust to the shoulders of the young.  It is melted by the ardor of companionship as swiftly as it is spun by the loom of adversity.  His interest in the strange scenes that the war brought to pass, his association with people—­intimate in a sense with the leading forces of rebellion, the airs of incipient grandeur, these raw instruments of government gave themselves—­all these things engrossed the observant faculties of the young man, who looked out upon the serio-comic harlequinade playing about him as a hostage of the Roundheads might have taken part in the showy festivities of the Cavaliers, in the years when the chances of battle had not gone over wholly to the Puritans.  Not that the figure illustrates the contrasting conditions adequately.  For, if the South prided itself at all—­and the South did pride itself vauntingly, clamorously, and incessantly—­it made its chief boast the point that its people were the gentry of the land, and that under the rebel banner the hosts of chivalry had assembled anew to make all manner of fine things the rule of life.  Jack, writing and talking of his few months’ experience, dwelt with wonder upon the curious ignorance of the two peoples respecting each other.  Mason and Dixon’s line separated two civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea.  The hierarchy not only seemed to love war for war’s sake; they possessed that feudal facalty, so incomprehensible in the middle ages, the power of making those who suffered most by it believe in it too, and sacrifice themselves for it.

The people—­Jack sagaciously remarked, in discussing the topic with Olympia—­seemed made for such a climate, rather than made by it.  They would have been out of place in the bleak autumn blasts, and wan, colorless seasons of Acredale, where the sun, bleary and dim, furtively skirted the low horizon from November until April, as if ashamed to be identified with the glorious courser that rode the radiant summer sky.  Here the sun came up of a morning—­a little tardy, ’tis true, but quite in the manner of the people—­warm and engaging, and when he went down in the afternoon he covered the western sky with a roseate mantle that fairly kept out the chill of the Northern night.  “No wonder,” Jack said to his sister, watching this daily spectacle—­“no wonder these people are warm, impulsive, and even energetic; here is an Italian climate without the enervating languor of that sensuous sunshine.”