nstant alarms of pirates and buccaneers. So
when I was once more my own man I traveled north to Virginia with a party
of traders. In my youth I had been an Oxford servitor, and schoolmasters
are in demand in Virginia. Weighed in the scales with a knowledge of the
humanities and some skill in imparting them, what matters a little mishap
with hot irons? My patrons are willing to let bygones be bygones. My
school flourishes like a green bay-tree, and the minister of this parish
will speak for the probity and sobriety of my conduct. Now I will go,
sir."

He made an awkward but deep and obsequious reverence, turned and went out
of the door, passing Juba, who was entering with a salver laden with bread
and meat and a couple of bottles. "Put down the food, Juba," said Haward,
"and see this gentleman out of the house."

An hour later the master dismissed the slave, and sat down beside the
table to finish the wine and compose himself for the night. The overseer
had come hurrying to the great house, to be sent home again by a message
from the owner thereof that to-morrow would do for business; the negro
women who had been called to make the bed were gone; the noises from the
quarter had long ceased, and the house was very still. In his rich,
figured Indian nightgown and his silken nightcap, Haward sat and drank his
wine, slowly, with long pauses between the emptying and the filling of the
slender, tall-stemmed glass. A window was open, and the wind blowing in
made the candles to flicker. With the wind came a murmur of leaves and the
wash of the river,--stealthy and mournful sounds that sorted not with the
lighted room, the cheerful homeliness of the flowered hangings, the
gleeful lady and child above the mantelshelf. Haward felt the incongruity:
a slow sea voyage, and a week in that Virginia which, settled one hundred
and twenty years before, was yet largely forest and stream, had weaned
him, he thought, from sounds of the street, and yet to-night he missed
them, and would have had the town again. When an owl hooted in the
walnut-tree outside his window, and in the distance, as far away as the
creek quarter, a dog howled, and the silence closed in again, he rose, and
began to walk to and fro, slowly, thinking of the past and the future. The
past had its ghosts,--not many; what spectres the future might raise only
itself could tell. So far as mortal vision went, it was a rose-colored
future; but on such a night of silence that was