Then you know, Fanny, I really
can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon
by their black servants."
This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted
in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the
first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a
half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its
way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their
child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did
not quite answer to the young lady's description of it, and get it
certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of
bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he
used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to
find it so changed.
"Yes," he said, "I can't account for him except as the ghost of Southern
travel, and I can't help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that
almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are
fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the
remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce.
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