Paul Ralston by Mary Jane Holmes

They were a very old Virginian family whose line of ancestry stretched backward quite as far as that of Miss Hansford, and touched the days of Cromwell, when white people were sent to Virginia and sold as slaves for a longer or shorter period of years. Among them came Samuel Percy, a Royalist, transported for some offense against the government and condemned to servitude for five years. Just what he did during the five years was not certainly known. Some said he was a blacksmith, some a tailor, and others a common field laborer, or at best an overseer of the negroes. That he was a bondman was sure and he worked out his time and then, unbroken in spirit, resolved to make for himself a name and a fortune and a family. With the latter he succeeded admirably, for the descendants of his five sons were scattered all over the South, each generation forgetting more and more that the root of the family tree in America had been a slave, and growing more and more proud of its English ancestry.

When the civil war broke out old Roger Percy owned a few negroes, a worn-out plantation and a big, rambling house in Virginia, just across the border of Maryland. Proud, morose and contrary, he seldom agreed with the people with whom he came in contact. His opinion was always the better one. With the Confederates he was a Federal,-with the Federals a Confederate, hurling anathemas at the heads of each and ordering them from his premises. As he was near the frontier he was visited at intervals by detachments from both armies, who, as he said, squeezed him dry, and at the close of the war he found himself alone, with his wife dead, his negroes gone, his house a ruin, or nearly so, and his land good for nothing. Too proud and indolent to work, he might have starved but for his only son, James, who, scoffing at a pride which would neither feed nor clothe him, found a position in the Treasury Department in Washington and offered his father a home. Grumblingly the old man accepted it, cursing the government and his small quarters and his dinners and black Sally, who waited upon him, and who, of all his negroes, had come back to him when peace was restored. Sometimes he cursed his son for being willing to take a subordinate position and work like a dog under somebody. This was what galled the worst,-working under somebody, and doing it willingly.