It related the life adventures of a young man, born in the South, of parents who had had little sympathy with the Confederate cause, attempting to carve out his career in the section of his birth and meeting opposition and defeat from the prejudices with which he constantly found himself in conflict.

The story found its main theme and background in the fact that the Southern States were so exclusively living in the memories of the Civil War that it was impossible for modern ideas to obtain a foothold.

"I have sometimes thought," said the author, and this passage may be taken as embodying the leading point of the narrative, "that many of the men who survived that unnatural war unwittingly did us a greater hurt than the war itself.

It gave everyone of them the intensest experience of his life and ever afterward he referred every other experience to this.

Thus it stopped the thought of most of them as an earthquake stops a clock.