The girls were always beautiful. The men Wore varnished boots, raced horses and played cards And drank mint-juleps till the time came round For fighting duels with their second cousins Or tar-and-feathering some God-damn Yankee.⁠ ⁠… The South⁠ ⁠… the honeysuckle⁠ ⁠… the hot sun⁠ ⁠… The taste of ripe persimmons and sugar-cane⁠ ⁠… The cloyed and waxy sweetness of magnolias⁠ ⁠… White cotton, blowing like a fallen cloud, And foxhounds belling the Virginia hills⁠ ⁠…

And then the fugitive slave he’d seen in Boston, The black man with the eyes of a tortured horse.⁠ ⁠…

He whistled Ned. What do you think of it, Ned? We’re abolitionists, I suppose, and Father Talks about Wendell Phillips and John Brown But, even so, that doesn’t have to mean We’ll break the Union up for abolition, And they can’t want to break it up for slavery⁠— It won’t come to real fighting, will it, Ned? But Ned was busy with a rabbit-track. There was the town⁠—the yellow window of home.