he said, “look old-fashioned.”  Oh, for a change in his beloved South—­a change of almost any kind!  “Even a heresy, if it be bright and fresh, would be a relief.  You feel as if you wished to see some kind of an effort put forth, a discussion, a fight, a runaway, anything to make the blood go faster.”  Wherever Page saw signs of a new spirit—­and he saw many—­he recorded them with an eagerness which showed his loyalty to the section of his birth.  The splitting up of great plantations into small farms he put down as one of the indications of a new day.  A growing tendency to educate, not only the white child, but the Negro, inspired a similar tribute.  But he rejoiced most over the decreasing bitterness of the masses over the memories of the Civil War, and discovered, with satisfaction, that any remaining ill-feeling was a heritage left not by the Union soldier, but by the carpetbagger.

And one scene is worth preserving, for it illustrates not only the zeal of Page himself for the common country, but the changing attitude of the Southern people.  It was enacted at Martin, Tennessee, on the evening of July 2, 1881.  Page was spending a few hours in the village grocery, discussing things in general with the local yeomanry, when the telegraph operator came from the post office with rather more than his usual expedition and excitement.  He was frantically waving a yellow slip which bore the news that President Garfield had been shot.  Garfield had been an energetic and a successful general in the war and his subsequent course in Congress, where he had joined the radical Republicans, had not caused the South to look upon him as a friend.  But these farmers responded to this shock, not like sectionalists, but like Americans.  “Every man of them,” Page records, “expressed almost a personal sorrow.  Little was said of politics or of parties.  Mr. Garfield was President of the United States—­that was enough.  A dozen voices spoke the great gratification that the assassin was not a Southern man.  It was an affecting scene to see weather-beaten old countrymen so profoundly agitated—­men who yesterday I should have supposed hardly knew and certainly did not seem to care who was President.  The great centres of population, of politicians, and of thought may be profoundly agitated to-night, but no more patriotic sorrow and humiliation is felt anywhere by any men than by these old backwoods ex-Confederates.”

Page himself was so stirred by the news that he ascended a cracker barrel, and made a speech to the assembled countrymen, preaching to responsive ears the theme of North and South, now reunited in a common sorrow.  Thus, by the time he was twenty-six, Page, at any rate in respect to his Americanism, was a full-grown man.

II