ight."

Then, as if the softening impulse were a part of the Sabbath stillness,
he leaned over the bed of sunflowers, and fixed his eyes on the pinkish
tower of Saint James' Church, which he could see palely enkindled
against the afterglow. A single white cloud floated like a dove in the
west, and beneath it a rain of light fell on the shadowy roofs of the
town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being
slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him
from the next garden. A vast melancholy--so vast that it seemed less the
effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in
nature--was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening,
from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very
bricks, sun-baked and scarred, spoke of the weariness of heat, of the
parching thirst of the interminable summers.

But to Cyrus the languor and the intense sweetness of the air suggested
only that the end of a hot day had come. "It's likely to be a drought,"
he was thinking while his upward gaze rested on the illuminated tower of
the church. "A drought will go hard with the tobacco."

Having emptied his pipe, he was about to take down his straw hat from a
nail on the wall, when the sound of the opening gate arrested him, and
he waited with his eyes fixed on the winding brick walk, where the negro
washerwoman appeared presently with a basket of clean clothes on her
head. Beneath her burden he saw that there were some primitive attempts
at Sunday adornment. She wore a green muslin dress, a little discoloured
by perspiration, but with many compensating flounces; a bit of yellow
ribbon floated from her throat, and in her hand she carried the festive
hat which would decorate her head after the removal of the basket. Her
figure, which had once been graceful, had grown heavy; and her face, of
a light gingerbread colour, with broad, not unpleasant features, wore a
humble, inquiring look--the look of some trustful wild animal that man
has tamed and only partly domesticated. Approaching the steps, she
brought down the basket from her head, and came on, holding it with a
deprecating swinging movement in front of her.

"Howdy, Marster," she said, as if uncertain whether to stop or to pass
on into the doorway.

"Howdy, Mandy," responded Cyrus. "There's a hot spell coming, I reckon."

Lowering the basket to the floor of the porch, the woman drew a red
bandanna