en sky, along the "snake fences," Nature, the great healer,
had brought her annual gift of the resurrection of hope.

"Cyrus means well," thought Gabriel, with a return of that natural
self-confidence without which no man can exist happily and make a
living. "He means well, but he takes a false view of life." And he added
after a minute: "It's odd how the commercial spirit seems to suck a man
dry when it once gets a hold on him."

He walked on rapidly, leaving the old horse and the ploughmen behind
him, and around his energetic little figure the grey dust, as fine as
powder, spun in swirls and eddies before the driving wind, which had
grown boisterous. As he moved there alone in the deserted road, with his
long black coat flapping against his legs, he appeared so insignificant
and so unheroic that an observer would hardly have suspected that the
greatest belief on the earth--the belief in Life--in its universality
in spite of its littleness, in its justification in spite of its
cruelties--that this belief shone through his shrunken little body as a
flame shines through a vase.

At the end of the next mile, midway between Dinwiddie and Cross's
Corner, stood the small log cabin of the former slave who had sent for
him, and as he approached the narrow path that led, between oyster
shells, from the main road to the single flat brown rock before the
doorstep, he noticed with pleasure how tranquil and happy the little
rustic home appeared under the windy brightness of the March sky.

"People may say what they please, but there never were happier or more
contented creatures than the darkeys," he thought. "I doubt if there's
another peasantry in the world that is half so well off or half so
picturesque."

A large yellow rooster, pecking crumbs from the threshold, began to
scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in
a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him
under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath
her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind
and groping effort at recognition.

"I got your message, Aunt Mehitable. Don't you know me?"

"Is dat you, Marse Gabriel? I made sho' you wan' gwineter let nuttin'
stop you f'om comin'."

"Don't I always come when you send for me?"

"You sutney do, suh. Dat's de gospel trufe--you sutney do."

As he looked at her standing there in the strong sunlight, with her
palsie