Shenandoah



  "Dear me, I had n't thought of it," laughed
Mrs. Haverill, the Colonel's wife. "Such mutual
appreciation ought to be kept in practice. At
the same time, let us hope that North and South
may never be alien in any other sense."
  "God grant it."
  " Amen."
  Fervent as these expressions were, they seemed
tinged with some indefinable sense of sadness and
foreboding.
  It was early spring of the year i86i. Sky and
water in that Southern seaboard clime were blue,
but it was the soft, dreamy blue of Mediterranean
shores. Nights of velvety dusk were lit with
strangely large, low-hung stars. The magnolias
were not yet in bloom, but amid the moss-veiled
live-oaks already the mocking-birds sang-or
rather rhapsodized in language of golden tone,
as if confiding thrilling secrets that burst from
stifled hearts.
  Charleston still wore unconsciously an Old-
World aspect, a sort of legendary glamour of
feudalism, the real or imagined heritage of
aristocratic Huguenot ancestors. Outward signs
of this abounded in her white stuccoed walls
and red roofs nestling amidst dense foliage-her
quaint architecture and frowning fortifications-



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