Miss Ravenel's conversion from secession to loyalty

by John William De Forest

"He did!" responds Miss Ravenel, all interest. "What did that mean? Why didn't you ask him to repeat it?"

"Because, my dear, he wasn't talking to me; he was talking to Mrs. Smith."

Here Miss Ravenel perceives that her habitual curiosity is being made fun of, and replies, "Papa, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."

"My child, you must give me some chance to write," retorts the Doctor; "or else you must learn to sit a little in your own room. Of course I prefer to have you here, but I do demand that you accord me some infinitesimal degree of consideration."

Father and daughter used to have many conversations not very dissimilar to the above. It was a constant prattle when they were together, unless the Doctor raised the standard of revolt and refused to talk in order that he might work. Ever since Lillie's earliest recollection they had been on these same terms of sociability, companionship, almost equality. The intimacy and democracy of the relation arose partly from the Doctor's extreme fondness for children and young people, and partly from the fact that he had lost his wife early, so that in his household life he had for years depended for sympathy upon his daughter.

Twice or thrice every morning the Doctor was obliged to remonstrate against Lillie's talkativeness, something after the manner of an affectionate old cat who allows her pussy to jump on her back and bite her ears for a half hour together, but finally imposes quiet by a velvety and harmless cuffing. Occasionally he avenged himself for her untimely demands on his attention by reading to her what he considered a successful passage of the article which he might then be composing. In this, however, he had not the least intention of punishment, but supposed that he was conferring a pleasure. It was an essential element of this genial, social, sympathetic nature to believe that whatever interested him would necessarily interest those whom he loved and even those with whom he simply came in contact. When Lillie offered corrections on his style, which happened frequently, he rarely hesitated to accept them. Vanity he had none, or at any rate displayed none, except on two subjects, his daughter and his scientific fame. As a proof of this last he gloried in an extensive correspondence with European savants, and made Lillie read every one of those queer-shaped letters, written on semi-transparent paper and with foreign stamps and postmarks on their envelopes, which reached him from across the Atlantic. Although medicine was his profession and had provided him with bread, he had latterly fallen in love with mineralogy, and in his vacation wanderings though that mountainous belt which runs from the Carolinas westward to Arkansas and Missouri he had discovered some new species which were eagerly sought for by the directors of celebrated European collections. Great was his delight at receiving in New Boston a weighty box of specimens which he had shipped as freight from New Orleans just previous to his own departure, but which for two months he had mourned over as lost. It dowered him with an embarrassment of riches. During a week his bed, sofa, table, wash-stand, chairs and floor were littered with the scraps of paper and tufts of cotton and of Spanish moss which had served as wrappers, and with hundreds of crystals, ores and other minerals. Over this confusion the Doctor domineered with a face wrinkled by happy anxiety, laying down one queer-colored pebble to pick up another, pronouncing this a Smithite and that a Brownite trying his blowpipe on them and then his hammer, and covering all the furniture with a layer of learned smudge and dust and gravel.

"Papa, you have puckered your forehead up till it is like a baked apple," Lillie would remonstrate. "You look more than five thousand years old; you look as though you might be the grandfather of all the mummies. Now do leave off bothering those poor Smithites and Hivites and Amelekites, and come and take a walk."

"My dear, you havn't the least idea how necessary it is to push one's discoveries to a certainty as quickly as possible," would answer the Doctor, meanwhile peering at a specimen through his magnifying glass. "The world won't wait for me to take your time. If I don't work fast enough in my researches, it will set somebody else at the job. It makes no allowance for Louisiana ideas of leisure and,"—here he suddenly breaks off his moralizing and exclaims, "My dear, this is not a Brownite; it is a Robinsonite—a most unquestionable and superb Robinsonite."

"Oh papa! I wish I was an unquestionable Robinsonite; then you would take some sort of interest in me," says Miss Lillie.

But the Doctor is lost in the ocean of his new discovery, and for fifteen minutes has not a word to say on any subject comprehensible to the young lady.