command Bohm’s ear; for Charley, although he was as neat as any barber, and let Hortense walk on him because he looked beyond that, and purposed to get her, was just as potent in the financial world as Bohm, could bring a borrowing empire to his own terms just as skillfully as could Bohm; was, in short, a man after Bohm’s own—­I had almost said heart:  the expression is so obstinately embedded in our language!  Bohm, listening, and Charley, talking, had neither of them noticed Mrs. Weguelin’s arrival; they stood ignoring her, while she waited, casting a timid eye upon them.  But Beverly, suddenly perceiving this, and begging her pardon for them, brought the party together, and we moved in among the old graves.

“Ah!” said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, “French!”

“It was the mother-tongue of these colonists,” Mrs. Weguelin explained to him.

“Ah! like Canada!” cried Gazza.  “But what a pretty bit is that!” And he stood back to admire a little glimpse, across a street, between tiled roofs and rusty balconies, of another church steeple.  “Almost, one would say, the Old World,” Gazza declared.

“Our world is not new,” said Mrs. Weguelin; and she passed into the church.

Kings Port holds many sacred nooks, many corners, many vistas, that should deeply stir the spirit and the heart of all Americans who know and love their country.  The passing traveller may gaze up at certain windows there, and see History herself looking out at him, even as she looks out of the windows of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  There are also other ancient buildings in Kings Port, where History is shut up, as in a strong-box,—­such as that stubborn old octagon, the powder-magazine of Revolutionary times, which is a chest holding proud memories of blood and war.  And then there are the three churches.  Not strong-boxes, these, but shrines, where burn the venerable lamps of faith.  And of these three houses of God, that one holds the most precious flame, the purest light, which treasures the holy fire that came from France.  The English colonists, who sat in the other two congregations, came to Carolina’s soil to better their estate; but it was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to God as their own conscience bade them, and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists sought the New World.  No Puritan splendor of independence and indomitable courage outshines theirs.  They preached a word as burning as any that Plymouth or Salem ever heard.  They were but a handful, yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community.  They are less known than Plymouth and Salem, because men of action, rather than men of letters, have sprung from the loins of the South; but there they stand, a beautiful beacon, shining upon the coasts of our early history.  Into their church, then,