98 OBSERVATIONS OF A RANCHWOMAN 



As late as the well - advanced eighties, 

 twenty years and more after the Civil War, 

 a Northern friend, teaching in a Southern 

 Sunday-school, received the following answer 

 to the question, ' Who is our ghostly enemy ?' 

 * The Yankee, ma'am.' The answer came 

 pat. and prompt from the exceedingly juvenile 

 son of a man himself scarcely old enough to 

 have carried a musket in the sixties. My 

 Northern friend and I were discoursing on 

 the strength of sectional feeling in the South, 

 and she brought forward this anecdote as 

 one of many proofs of that strength. It is 

 difficult for me to believe that the resentment 

 and antagonism rampant in the South in my 

 day has entirely passed away. The North 

 never has fully appreciated the sense of injury 

 born of cruelties and injustice which, how- 

 ever necessary, were at once horrible and 

 irreparable left by the war, any more than 

 she appreciates the distinctive national dif- 

 ferences existing betwixt, for instance, a 

 Virginian or Georgian and a regular ' down- 

 easter ' from Maine. Like oil and water, 

 they may live in peace, but they will never 

 assimilate. 



