"Why, allowing for some natural exaggeration, yes."
"You built Rosemont about the time her mother died, didn't you?"
"Yes, about three years before the war broke out. It was the only piece of land she had left; too small for a plantation, but just the thing for a college."
"It is neatly named," pursued the questioner; "who did it?"
"I," half soliloquized the narrator, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality.
He moved into view, a large man of forty, unmilitary, despite his good gray broadcloth and wealth of gold braid, though of commanding and most comfortable mien. His upright coat-collar, too much agape, showed a clerical white cravat. His right arm was in a sling. He began to pick his way out of the brambles, dusting himself with a fine handkerchief. The horse came to meet him.
At the same time his young companion stepped upon a fallen tree, and stood to gaze, large-eyed, like the horse, across the sun-bathed scene. He seemed scant nineteen. His gray shirt was buttoned with locust thorns, his cotton-woolen jacket was caught under an old cartridge belt, his ragged trousers were thrust into bursted boots, and he was thickly powdered with white and yellow dust. His eyes swept slowly over the battle-ground to some low, wooded hills that rose beyond it against the pale northwestern sky.
"Major," said he.
The Major was busy lifting himself carefully into the saddle and checking his horse's eagerness to be off. But the youth still gazed, and said again, "Isn't that it?"
"What?"