"Once I thought I'd try to make some money, so I sold some timber to a Yankee firm who wanted fine cypress, and with the money I constructed a terrapin crawl. I knew how expensive terrapin are, and, if there is one thing I do know about, it is terrapin. So I canned a few prize-winners, and sent them to New York, and got word that they would take all I could send. Well, with that I began to feel like a Jay Gould. I could just see myself drinking champagne and going to the opera every night. So I immediately raised some mo' money in the same way,--out of the Yankees,--organized a small company, and built a canning factory. The lumber company was interested with me and advanced me all the money I wanted. So I got the thing well started, and left special word with the foreman, a cracker named Sharpe, to be sure and not can the claws, then I went off to New York to enjoy myself. I stayed until all my money was gone and then came home, intending to enjoy the wealth my foreman had built up in my absence. But what do you reckon that fool had done? Why, he had turned the work over to the niggers, and they had canned the terrapin just so,--claws, eyebrows, and all! Well, of course, the New York people went back on me,--wrote me the most impudent letters I ever got from anybody. It just showed me that Yankees can never hope to be considered gentlemen. Why, they acted as if I had cheated them! Said they had advertised largely on my samples, and had lost money and credit by my dishonest trickery. Just as if I were to blame! Then, of course, the Yankee lumbermen got mad, too, and foreclosed the mortgage and liquidated the company, and left me as poor as when I went in. I believe they even declare that I owe them money. Did you ever hear of such a piece of impudence?"
"Never," said Carolina, coolly, "if you mean on your part! You did everything that was wrong and nothing that was right. And the worst of it is that you are morally blind to your share of the blame."
"Why, Miss Carolina, what do you mean? I didn't go to lose their money. It hit me just as hard as it did them. I didn't make a cent."
"But the money that you lost wasn't yours to lose," cried Carolina, hotly.
"No, but I didn't do wrong intentionally. You can't blame a man for a mistake."
"There is such a thing as criminal negligence," said the girl, deliberately. "You had no business to trust an affair where your honour was pledged to an incompetent cracker foreman, and go to New York on the company's money, even if you did think you would earn the money to pay it back. How do you ever expect to pay it?"
"I don't expect to pay it at all, and I reckon those Yankees don't expect it, either."
"No, I don't suppose they do," said Carolina, bitterly.
"Well, if they are satisfied to lose it, and have forgotten all about it, would you bother to pay it back if you were in my place?"
"I would pay it back if I had to pay it out of my life insurance and be buried in a pine coffin in the potter's field! And as to those Northerners having forgotten it,--don't you believe it! They have simply laid it to what they call the to-be-expected dishonesty of the South when dealing with the North. The South calls it 'keeping their eyes peeled,' 'being wide-awake,' 'not being caught napping,' or catch phrases of that order. But the strictly honest business man calls it dishonest trickery, and mentally considers all Southerners inoculated with its poison. Do you know what Southern credit is worth in the North?"