“Thank you,” he said, “I have read the papers.”

Having thus disposed of some of the lad’s words, he addressed a pointed question to the rest: 

“But how did you happen to call me mister?  I thought boss was what you little New-Yorkers generally said.”

“I’m not a New-Yorker,” announced the lad, with ready courtesy and good nature.  “I don’t say boss.  We are Southerners.  I say mister.”

He gave the man an unfavorable look as though of a mind to take his true measure; also as being of a mind to let the man know that he had not taken the boy’s measure.

The man smiled at being corrected to such good purpose; but before he could speak again, the lad went on to clinch his correction: 

“And I only say mister when I am selling papers and am not at home.”

“What do you say when not selling papers and when you are at home?” asked the man, forced to a smile.

“I say ‘sir,’ if I say anything,” retorted the lad, flaring up, but still polite.

The man looked at him with increasing interest.  Another word in the lad’s speech had caught his attention—­Southerner.

That word had been with him a good deal in recent years; he had not quite seemed able to get away from it.  Nearly all classes of people in New York who were not Southerners had been increasingly reminded that the Southerners were upon them.  He had satirically worked it out in his own mind that if he were ever pushed out of his own position, it would be some Southerner who pushed him.  He sometimes thought of the whole New York professional situation as a public wonderful awful dinner at which almost nothing was served that did not have a Southern flavor as from a kind of pepper.  The guests were bound to have administered to them their shares of this pepper; there was no getting away from the table and no getting the pepper out of the dinner.  There was the intrusion of the South into every delicacy.

“We are Southerners,” the lad had announced decisively; and there the flavor was again, though this time as from a mere pepper-box in a school basket.  Thus his next remark was addressed to his own thoughts as well as to the lad: 

“And so you are a Southerner!” he reflected audibly, looking down at the Southern plague in small form.

“Why, yes, Mister, we are Southerners,” replied the lad, with a gay and careless patriotism; and as giving the handy pepper-box a shake, he began to dust the air with its contents:  “I was born on an old Southern battle-field.  When Granny was born there, it had hardly stopped smoking; it was still piled with wounded and dead Northerners.  Why, one of the worst batteries was planted in our front porch.”

This enthusiasm as to the front porch was assumed to be acceptable to the listener.  The battery might have been a Cherokee rose.

The man had listened with a quizzical light in his eyes.