A faint moisture dampened the old man's withered eyes. He drank
an extra thimbleful of whisky to try to hearten himself. Its bouquet
filled the time-worn stateliness of the dining-room.
* * * * *
During the weeks of Peter's stay at the manor it had grown to be the
Captain's habit really to write for two or three hours in the afternoon,
and his pile of manuscript had thickened under his application.
The old man was writing a book called "Reminiscences of Peace and War."
His book would form another unit of that extraordinary crop of personal
reminiscences of the old South which flooded the presses of America
during the decade of 1908-18. During just that decade it seemed as if the
aged men and women of the South suddenly realized that the generation who
had lived through the picturesqueness and stateliness of the old slave
regime was almost gone, and over their hearts swept a common impulse to
commemorate, in the sunset of their own lives, its fading splendor and
its vanished deeds.
On this particular afternoon the Captain settled himself to work, but
his reminiscences did not get on.
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