reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold—Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it—”

Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, passed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat.

It was Richard Pinckney.

The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.

“There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett,” said she. “Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they’re bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them—”

She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, 113 she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.

113

That evening after supper Miss Pinckney’s mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.

She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the ’50’s and ’60’s, many of whom she had known when young.

Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the Southern Literary Messenger, the Home Journal, the Mirror and the Broadway Journal.

People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.

“They’re all dead and gone,” said she, “and folk nowadays don’t seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there’s nothing 

 Prev. P 66/185 next