“Oh, just that he didn’t see that at all—­and then he said that he was going away this fall to study medicine, and some day when he was a doctor he would have a chance to get even with me, and wouldn’t he dose me well.  Then we both laughed, and—­I shook hands with him.  That’s all, sir.”

“Well, I am pleased.  He is by no means a bad fellow, and as you know he is clever—­and can beat you in mathematics.”

“Yes, but I licked him well, and he knows it.”

“For shame, John.  I wish my Baptist friend’s boy would do better—­he is dull.”

“But I like him,” said John.  “He is so plucky.”

“There is another matter I want to talk about.  I had a long conversation about you with your uncle the night before he left.  I heard with regret that you want to go into the army.”

“May I ask why?” said John, as he lay on the ground lazily fingering the pine-needles.

“Is it because the hideous business called war attracts you?”

“No, but I like what I hear of the Point from Uncle Jim.  I prefer it to any college life.  Besides this, I do not expect to spend my life in the service, and after all it is simply a first rate training for anything I may want to do later—­care of the mills, I mean.  Uncle Jim is pleased, and as for war, Mr. Rivers, if that is what you dislike, what chance of war is there?”

“You have very likely forgotten my talk with Mr. George Grey.  The North and the South will never put an end to their differences without bloodshed.”

It seemed a strange opinion to John.  He had thought so when he heard their talk, but now the clergyman’s earnestness and some better understanding of the half-century’s bitter feeling made him thoughtful.  Rising to his feet, he said, “Uncle Jim does not agree with you, and Aunt Ann and her brother, Henry Grey, think that Mr. Buchanan will bring all our troubles to an end.  Of course, sir, I don’t know, but”—­and his voice rose—­“if there ever should be such a war, I am on Uncle Jim’s side, and being out of West Point would not keep me out of the fight.”

Rivers shook his head.  “It will come, John.  Few men think as I do, and your uncle considers me, I suspect, to be governed by my unhappy way of seeing the dark side of things.  He says that I am a bewildered pessimist about politics.  A pessimist I may be, but it is the habitually hopeful meliorist who is just now perplexed past power to think straight.”

John’s interest was caught for the moment by the word, “meliorist.”  “What is a meliorist, sir?” he asked.  “Oh, a wild insanity of hopefulness.  You all have it.  I dislike to talk about the sad future, and I wonder men at the North are so blind.”