l over them, she stood there wrapped in the beliefs and
customs of that other century to which she belonged. Her sentiments had
clustered about the past, as his had done, until the border-line between
the romance and the actuality had vanished. She could not help him
because she, also, possessed the retrospective, not the constructive,
vision. He was not conscious of these thoughts, and yet, although he was
unconscious of them, they coloured his reflections while he stood there
in the sunlight, which had begun to fall aslant the blasted pine by the
roadside. The wind had lowered until it came like the breath of spring,
bud-scented, caressing, provocative. Even Gabriel, whose optimism lay in
his blood and bone rather than in his intellect, yielded for a moment
to this call of the spring as one might yield to the delicious
melancholy of a vagrant mood. The long straight road, without bend or
fork, had warmed in the paling sunlight to the colour of old ivory; in a
neighbouring field a young maple tree rose in a flame of buds from the
ridged earth where the ploughing was over; and against the azure sky in
the south a flock of birds drifted up, like blown smoke, from the
marshes.

"Tell me your trouble, then," he said, dropping into the cane-seated
chair she had brought out of the cabin and placed between the flat stone
at the doorstep and the well-brink, on which the yellow rooster stood
spreading his wings. But Aunt Mehitable had returned to the cabin, and
when she reappeared she was holding out to him a cracked saucer on which
there was a piece of preserved watermelon rind and a pewter spoon.

"Dish yer is de ve'y same sort er preserves yo' mouf use'n ter water fur
w'en you wuz a chile," she remarked as she handed the sweet to him.
Whatever her anxiety or affliction could have been, the importance of
his visit had evidently banished it from her mind. She hovered over him
as his mother may have done when he was in his cradle, while the
cheerful self-effacement in which slavery had trained her lent a
pathetic charm to her manner.

"How peaceful it looks," he thought, sitting there, with the saucer in
his hand, and his eyes on the purple shadows that slanted over the
ploughed fields. "You have a good view of the low-grounds, Aunt
Mehitable," he said aloud, and added immediately, "What's that noise in
the road? Do you hear it?"

The old woman shook her head.

"I'se got sorter hard er heahin', Marse Gabriel, but dar's al'