“Oh, by all odds,” he replied, instantly, “we understand you best.  We send fifty thousand travellers, more or less, North every summer to your watering-places.  Hot down in Mobile,”—­his style taking somewhat unpleasantly the intonation as well as the negligence of the bar-room,—­“can’t live in Mobile in the summer.  Then your papers circulate more among us than ours among you.  Our daughters are educated at Northern boarding-schools, our sons at Northern colleges:  both my colleague and myself were educated at Northern colleges.  For these reasons, by all odds, we have a better opportunity for understanding you than you have for understanding us.”

“In case of general secession and war,” the writer ventured next to inquire, “would there probably, in your opinion, be danger of a slave insurrection?”

“None at all.  Certainly far less than of ‘Bread or Blood’ riots at the North.”

The writer was surprised to find, notwithstanding Mr. Toombs’s eulogy of Southern opportunities, his understanding of the North so imperfect, and still more surprised at the political and social principles involved in the spirit of what followed.

“Your poor population can hold ward-meetings, and can vote.  But we know better how to take care of ours.  They are in the fields, and under the eye of their overseers.  There can be little danger of an insurrection under our system.”

The subject and the manner of the man, in spite of his better qualities, were becoming painful, and the writer ventured only one more remark.

“An ugly time, certainly, if war comes between North and South.”

“Ugly time? Oh, no!”

The writer will never forget the tone of utter carelessness and nonchalance with which the last round-toned exclamation was uttered.

“Oh, no!  War is nothing.  Never more than a tenth part of the adult population of a country in the field.  We have four million voters.  Say a tenth of them, or four hundred thousand men, are in the field on both sides.  A tenth of them would be killed or die of camp diseases.  But they would die, any way.  War is nothing.”

The tone perfectly proved this belief, not badinage.

“Some property would be destroyed, towns injured, fences overturned, and the Devil raised generally; but then all that would have a good effect.  Only yaller-covered-literature men and editors make a noise about war.  Wars are to history what storms are to the atmosphere,—­purifiers.  We shall meet, as we ought, whoever invades our rights, with the bayonet.  We are the gentlemen of this land, and gentlemen always make revolutions in history.”

This was said in the tone of an injured, but haughty man, with perfect intellectual poise and earnestness, yet with a fervor of feeling that brought the speaker erect in his chair.

The significance of the last remarks, which the writer can make oath he has preserved verbatim, being somewhat calculated to draw on a debate, of course wholly unfitted to the time and place, the writer, apologizing for having taken so much time at a formal interview, and receiving, of course, a most courteous invitation to renew the call, found himself, after but twenty minutes’ conversation, on the street, in the lonely December evening, with a mind full of reflections.