The Patriots of the South Author:Cyrus Townsend Brady General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1906 Original Publisher: Cassell Subjects: United States Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.... more »com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II GOD SAVE THE UNITED STATES They made a pretty picture, those two. The white-haired old man sat in a large easy chair which had been especially designed for his comfort. For many years he had been without the use of his lower limbs and a light coverlet of silk was spread over them. His handsome and intellectual old face was clean-shaven, his long hair, white as the infrequent snows of his native land, fell in waves that were almost curls upon his still broad shoulders. Age had dimmed the sight of his eyes, but they could still flash with the soft wavering light of crowning years, like a far-off vanishing storm upon a summer night. His thin aristocratic hands lay listless upon his motionless knees. There was a troubled look on his face which ill-accorded with the beautiful, peaceful scene spread before his fading vision. By his side stood a mere slip of a girl, pale of face, dark of hair, slight of figure -- an undeveloped child who had just passed her sixteenth birthday. The lines of her face and form were full of promise, but the realisation would be long deferred. This was singular, for in the sunshine of that Southland the flowers blossomed early, and most things that were beautiful -- including the young . women -- matured early. Girls frequently were married at sixteen, at seventeen they were mothers, and in those terrible days of war some of them became widows while they were yet scarcely more than children. It was not so with Ariadne Lewis. Perhaps some quality of her French great-grandmother, Anne de Rohan, which she had receiv...« less