THE AWAKENING
forest where the growth is lighter and of a different variety."
"Then you must clear it over again?" asked Giles.
"That part is not difficult; the dikes are the main problems, and they are almost as good as ever. One must build new trunks, of course, and plug rat holes. Sometimes you will find a loblolly three feet in diameter, or a great gum or live oak growing right from the middle of one of these dikes, and as they could not have come until after the plantation was abandoned, one can see that they are pretty old. We have our antiquities in Carolina, Giles."
"Don't doubt it—if you call anything under five hundred years an antiquity. I fancy this lawn is that."
"Don't!" implored Virginia. "You make me feel so transient."
"Of course the impression is different in a place kept up; one doesn't feel the flight of time," said Manning. "I could show you the ruins of old estates about Charleston and Georgetown that would impress you as older than Fenwick."
"Entirely abandoned?"
"Utterly; the only tenants that remain are the snakes and spiders and the ghosts of dead ambitions; yet fifty years ago that country was the garden spot of the continent."
"Owing to the change from slave to paid labor?" asked Giles. He was interested in all problems sociological and economic; he had elected politics for his future career.
"No," replied Manning bitterly; "owing to the change from slave labor to none at all. The scoundrels
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