The Valiants of Virginia

he sensation, spiritually, of a traveler awakened with a rude shock amid wholly unfamiliar surroundings.

since he had been old enough to wonder about such things, he had had no one to ask questions of. There had been no private papers or letters left for his adult perusal. It had been borne upon him

iant of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court.... I can not tell you myself." There was

e muttered; "what odd spelling! 'Robert Valyant'-without the 'e.' Here, in 1730, the 'y' begins to be 'i.'" There was somethin

westward. The sons of those who had braved sea and savages had bowed their strong bodies and their stronger hearts to raze the forests and turn the primeval jungles into golden plantations. Except as regarded his father, Valiant had never known ancestral pride before. He

g half-humorous mortification-a slender needle-prick of shame. The empty pretensions, subsisting on the

lazing with incandescents, interminable and alluring-an apotheosis of fevered movement and hectic color. He knew suddenly that he was sick of it all: its jostle and glitter, its mad race after bubbles, its hideous under-surface contrasts of wealth and squalor, its

e been the very day on which he had elected poverty? Here was a foreordination as pointed as the index-finger of a g

s if unsuccessful mastication of the flattish packet that had fallen from the folded deed-and with muc

nd extricated the object it had enc

l old-fashioned photograph, much battered and soiled. It had been cut from a larger group and the name of the photographer had been erased from the back

re the same, eyes, brow, lips, and strong waving hair. But for its tim

ing, the pictured face propped on the desk b