“It will be delicious to watch his face as you and I alight from this train together, boy.  It will be worth the trouble of this hurried trip to New York to be introduced to a person who disappeared suddenly in a tug boat in the open ocean when he should have landed at the docks with the propriety that would have been expected of him.”  And as she spoke I could see that something had happened in New York which had brought much irritation to the beautiful Madam Whitworth.

“It would seem that it is one of the customs of these great ships to send out passengers from them in those very funny small tug boats,” I remarked as I leaned forward to catch a last fleeting glimpse of a lovely girl standing in the doorway of an ancient farmhouse, giving food to chickens so near the course of the railroad train that it would seem we should disperse them with fright.  “I wept when I must see my good friend, Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, depart from our ship in one of those tug boats.  It was a pain in my breast that he must leave me to go into the wildness of Canada.”

“Oh, then he went to Canada first?” exclaimed that Madam Whitworth as she leaned back on her seat as if relieved from some form of a great anxiety about the departure of that Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles.

“Is it that you are also a friend of my Capitaine?” I demanded with a great eagerness of pleasure if it should be so.

“Oh, no, no, indeed!” exclaimed the beautiful Madam Whitworth.  “I was speaking of my own friend who might have taken a Canadian line instead of the American.  She is so careless about instructions.  Now look; we are beginning to wind down into the very heart of the Harpeth Valley, and by the time you make very tidy that mop of hair you have on your head and I powder my nose, we will be in Hayesville to face the General in all of his glory.  Mind you kiss my hand so he can see you!  I want to give him that sensation in payment of a debt I owe him.  Now do go and smooth the mop if it takes a pint of water to do it.  That New York tailor has turned you out wonderfully, but even those very square English tweeds do not entirely disguise the French cavalier.  You’re a beautiful boy and the girls in Hayesville will eat you up—­if the General ever lets them get a sight of you—­which he probably won’t.  Now go to the mop!”

For many years, since the lonely day just after the death of my mother, when my father took me into the furthest depths of his sad heart and told me of his exile from the place in which he had been born, and about the elder brother who had hated my beautiful mother, who hated all women, I had spent much time erecting in my mind a statue that would be the semblance of that wicked and cruel Uncle.  I had taken every disagreeable feature of face and body that I had beheld in another human, or in a picture, or had read of in the tales of that remarkable Mr. Dickens, who could so paint in words a monstrous person to come when