Altogether it was a piquant period in Page’s life.  He found that he had suddenly become a “traitor” to his country and that his experiences in the North had completely “Yankeeized” him.  Even in more mature days, Page’s pen had its javelin-like quality; and in 1884, possessed as he was of all the fury of youth, he never hesitated to return every blow that was rained upon his head.  As a matter of fact he had a highly enjoyable time.  The State Chronicle during his editorship is one of the most cherished recollections of older North Carolinians to-day.  Even those who hurled the liveliest epithets in his direction have long since accepted the ideas for which Page was then contending; “the only trouble with him,” they now ruefully admit, “was that he was forty years ahead of his time.”  They recall with satisfaction the satiric accounts which Page used to publish of Democratic Conventions—­solemn, long-winded, frock-coated, white-neck-tied affairs that displayed little concern for the reform of the tariff or of the civil service, but an energetic interest in pensioning Confederate veterans and erecting monuments to the Southern heroes of the Civil War.  One editorial is joyfully recalled, in which Page referred to a public officer who was distinguished for his dignity and his family tree, but not noted for any animated administration of his duties, as “Thothmes II.”  When this bewildered functionary searched the Encyclopaedia and learned that “Thothmes II” was an Egyptian king of the XVIIIth dynasty, whose dessicated mummy had recently been disinterred from the hot sands of the desert, he naturally stopped his subscription to the paper.  The metaphor apparently tickled Page, for he used it in a series of articles which have become immortal in the political annals of North Carolina.  These have always been known as the “Mummy letters.”  They furnished a vivid but rather aggravating explanation for the existing backwardness and chauvinism of the commonwealth.  All the trouble, it seems, was caused by the “mummies.”  “It is an awfully discouraging business,” Page wrote, “to undertake to prove to a mummy that it is a mummy.  You go up to it and say, ’Old fellow, the Egyptian dynasties crumbled several thousand years ago:  you are a fish out of water.  You have by accident or the Providence of God got a long way out of your time.  This is America.’  The old thing grins that grin which death set on its solemn features when the world was young; and your task is so pitiful that even the humour of it is gone.  Give it up.”

Everything great in North Carolina, Page declared, belonged to a vanished generation.  “Our great lawyers, great judges, great editors, are all of the past. . . .  In the general intelligence of the people, in intellectual force and in cultivation, we are doing nothing.  We are not doing or getting more liberal ideas, a broader view of this world. . . .  The presumptuous powers of ignorance, heredity, decayed respectability and stagnation that control public action and public expression are absolutely leading us back intellectually.”