Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not forget.  The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever.  If to err is human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same token, attained something like divinity.

Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.

Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in those States which suffered the greatest hardships.  I know, for instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to enter the Massachusetts Building at the Chicago World’s Fair, and there are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and Stripes.  The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the South.  Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother’s bridal wreath.  When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a negro child.  However, war had not then broken out in Europe.  It would be different now.

A Virginia lady told me of having gone to a dentist in Winchester, Virginia, and having taken her little niece with her.  The child watched the dentist put a rubber dam in her aunt’s mouth, and then, childlike, began to ask questions.  She was a northern child, and she had evidently heard some one in the town speak of Sheridan’s ride.

“Auntie,” she said, “was Sheridan a Northerner or a Southerner?”

Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist answered for her.  “He was a drunken Yankee!” he declared vehemently.

When, later, the rubber dam was removed, the aunt protested.

“Doctor,” she reproved, “you should not have said such a thing to my niece.  She is from New York.”

“Then,” returned the unrepentant dentist, “she has heard the truth for once!”

Doubtless this man was an inheritor of hate, like the descendants of one uncompromisingly bitter old Southerner whose will, to be seen among the records of the Hanover County courthouse, in Virginia, bequeaths to his “children and grandchildren and their descendants throughout all future generations, the bitter hatred and everlasting malignity of my heart and soul against the Yankees, including all people north of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

CHAPTER XIX

“YOU-ALL” AND OTHER SECTIONAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS

    Let us make an honorable retreat.

    —­AS YOU LIKE IT.