I think that John Mayrant, Jr., is going to look like his mother. I was very glad to be present when he was christened, and at this ceremony I did not feel as I had felt the year before at the wedding; for then I had known well enough that if the old ladies found any blemish on that occasion, it was my being there! To them I must remain forever a "Yankee," a wall perfectly imaginary and perfectly real between us; and the fact that young John could take any other view of me, was to them a sign of that "radical" tendency in him which they were able to forgive solely because he was of the younger generation and didn't know any better.

And with these thoughts in my mind, and remembering a certain very grave talk I had once held with Eliza in the Exchange about the North and the South, in which it was my good fortune to make her see that there is on our soil nowadays such a being as an American, who feels, wherever he goes in our native land, that it is all his, and that he belongs everywhere to it, I looked at the little John Mayrant, and then I said to his mother:--

"And will you teach him 'Dixie' and 'Yankee Doodle' as well?"

But Eliza smiled at me............