“‘Time the tomb-builder’” fell from my lips ere they were aware.  “That is a grand thought—­one that I saw lately in a Western poem, the New-Year’s address of a young editor of Kentucky called Prentice.  Is it not splendid, Marion?”

“Very awful, rather,” she responded, with a faint shudder.  “Time the ‘comforter,’ let us say, instead, Miss Miriam—­Time the ‘veil-spreader.’”

“Why, Marion, you are quite poetic to-day, quite Greek!  That is a sweet and tender saying of yours, and I shall garner it.  I stand reproved, my child.  All honor to Time, the merciful, whether he builds palaces or tombs! but none the less do I reverence my young poet for that stupendous utterance of his soul.  I shall watch the flight of that eaglet of the West with interest from this hour!  May he aspire!”

“Not if he is a Jackson Democrat?” broke in the usually gentle Alice Durand, fired with a ready defiance of all heterodox policy, common, if not peculiar, to that region.

“Oh, but he is not; he is a good Whig instead—­a Clay man, as we call such.”

“Not a Calhoun man, though, I suppose, so I would not give a snap of my fingers for him or his poetry!  It is very natural, for you, Miss Harz,” in a somewhat deprecating tone, “to praise your partisans.  I would not have you neutral if I could, it is so contemptible.”

A little of the good doctor’s spirit there, under all that exterior of meekness and modesty, I saw at a glance, and liked her none the less for it, if truth were told.  And now we were nearing the gate, with its gray-stone pillars, on one of which, that from which the marble ball had rolled, to hide in the grass beneath, perchance, until the end of all, I had seen the joyous figure of Walter La Vigne so lightly poised on the occasion of my last exodus from Beauseincourt.  A moment’s pause, and the difficult, disused bolts that had once exasperated the patience of Colonel La Vigne were drawn asunder, and the clanking gates clashed behind us as we emerged from the shadowed domain into the glare and dust of the high-road.

Here Major Favraud, accompanied by Duganne, awaited us, seated in state in his lofty, stylish swung gig (with his tiny tiger behind), drawn tandem-wise by his high-stepping and peerless blooded bays, Castor and Pollux.  Brothers, like the twins of Leda, they had been bred in the blue-grass region of Kentucky and the vicinity of Ashland, and were worthy of their ancient pedigree, their perfect training and classic names, the last bestowed when he first became their owner, by Major Favraud, who, with a touch of the whip or a turn of the hand, controlled them to subjection, fiery coursers although they were!

Dr. Durand, too, with his spacious and flame-lined gig, accompanied by his son, a lad of sixteen, awaited our arrival, and served to swell the cavalcade that wound slowly down the dusty road, with its sandy surface and red-clay substratum.  A few young gentlemen on horseback completed our cortege.