aced the outstretched wings of the
noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The loss of the nose had
distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which gave a leer to the
remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his
voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced
at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab, and laughed again
for the sheer joy of discord.

III

Nicholas followed the main street to its sudden end at King's College,
and turned into one of the diverging ways which skirted the whitewashed
plank fence of the college grounds, and led to what was known in the
neighbourhood as the Old Stage Road. Passing a straggling group of negro
cabins, it stretched, naked, bleached, and barren, for a good half-mile,
dividing with its sandy length the low-lying fields, which were sown on
the one side in a sparse crop of grain and on the other in the rich
leaves and round pink heads of ripening clover. At the end of the
half-mile the road ascended a slight elevation, and the character of the
soil changed abruptly into clay of vivid red, which, extending a dozen
yards up the rain-washed hillside, appeared, in a general view of the
landscape, like the scarlet tongue protruding from the silvery body of a
serpent.

Far ahead to the right of the highway and beyond the thinly sown wheat a
stretch of pine woodland was darkly limned against the western horizon,
standing a gloomy advance guard of the shadows of the night. At its foot
the newer green of the late spring foliage took a frivolous aspect,
presenting the effect of deep-tinted foam breaking against the
impenetrable mass of darkness.

The boy trudged resolutely along the sandy road, reaching at intervals
to grasp handfuls of sassafras leaves from the bushes beside the way.
From the ditch on the left a brown toad hopped slowly into the dust of
the road. On the worm-eaten rails of the fence, on the other side, a
gray lizard glided swiftly like a stealthy shadow of the leaves of the
poisonous oak.

Nicholas picked up a stone from the roadside and aimed it at the slimy
little body, but his throw erred, and the missile fell harmlessly into
the wheat field beyond, startling a blackbird with scarlet marks, which
soared suddenly above the bearded grain and vanished, with a tremulous
cry and a flame of outstretched wings, into the distant wood.

The sun had gone down behind the pines and a warm mist steamed up fro