And now it ain't no better'n rusty copper; hit'll be green and pisenous.
An' whose done it? Gorm Smallin! My own brother, Gorm Smallin!"
When he finds his brother he says to him: "Ef ye had been killed
in a fa'r battle, I mought ha' been able to fight hard enough for both of us;
for every time I cried a-thinkin' of you, I'd ha' been twice as strong,
an' twice as clear-sighted as I was buffore. But -- sich things as these
burns me an' weakens me and hurts my eyes that bad that I kin scarcely
look a man straight furard in the face. Hit don't make
much difference to me now whether we whips the Yanks or they whips us. . . .
We is kin to a deserter! . . . I cain't shoot ye hardly.
The same uns raised us and fed us. I cain't do it; an' I am sorry I cain't."
He then makes him swear a vow: "God A'mighty's a-lookin at you
out o' the stars yon, an' he's a-listenin' at you out o' the sand here,
and he won't git tired by mornin'."
--
* Part ii, chapter vi.
--
The coming of gunboats up the river scatters the party in all directions,
some to prison and others to the final scenes around Richmond,
with the burning of which the story closes, not, however,
before the palace in the mountains -- where John Sterling and his wife,
Felix and Ottilie, have spent the intervening time -- is set fire to
by Gorm Smallin. The story is scarcely significant enough
to follow all the threads.
"Tiger Lilies" has the same place in Lanier's life that "Hyperion" has
in Longfellow's.
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