While many of the old regime were willing to admit that the patriarchal life, with the negro as the worker and the master as the spender, had seen its best days, but few of them, at the period of these chronicles, realized that the genius of Morse, Hoe, and McCormick, and a dozen others, whose inventions were just beginning to be criticised, and often condemned, were really the chief factors in the making of a new and greater democracy: that the cog, the drill, the grate-bar, and the flying shuttle would ere long supplant the hoe and the scythe; and that when the full flood of this new era was reached their old-time standards of family pride, reckless hospitality, and even their old-fashioned courtesy would well-nigh be swept into space.

The storm raised over this and the preceding duel had they but known it, was but a notch in the tide-gauge of this flood.
"I understand, St.George, that you could have stopped that disgraceful affair the other night if you had raised your hand," Judge Pancoast had blurted out in an angry tone at the club the week following.

"I did raise it, judge," replied St.George, calmly drawing off his gloves.
"They don't say so--they say you stood by and encouraged it." "Quite true," he answered in his dryest voice.

"When I raised my hand it was to drop my handkerchief.

They fired as it fell." "And a barbarous and altogether foolish piece of business, Temple.
There is no justification for that sort of thing, and if Rutter wasn't a feudal king up in his own county there would be trouble over it.