er. With it,
however, he found a couple of yellow, time-stained envelopes,
addressed on the outside to Major John Treadwell.

The envelopes were unsealed. He glanced into one of them, and seeing
that it contained a sheet, folded small, presumably a letter, he
thrust the two of them into the breast pocket of his coat, intending
to hand them to Miss Laura at their next meeting. They were probably
old letters and of no consequence, but they should of course be
returned to the owners.

In putting the desk back in its place, after returning the panel and
closing the crevice against future accidents, the colonel caught his
coat on a projecting point and tore a long rent in the sleeve. It was
an old coat, and worn only about the house; and when he changed it
before leaving to pay his call upon old Malcolm Dudley, he hung it in
a back corner in his clothes closet, and did not put it on again for a
long time. Since he was very busily occupied in the meantime, the two
old letters to which he had attached no importance, escaped his memory
altogether.

The colonel's coachman, a young coloured man by the name of Tom, had
complained of illness early in the morning, and the colonel took
Peter along to drive him to Mink Run, as well as to keep him company.
On their way through the town they stopped at Mrs. Treadwell's, where
they left Phil, who had, he declared, some important engagement with
Graciella.

The distance was not long, scarcely more than five miles. Ben Dudley
was in the habit of traversing it on horseback, twice a day. When they
had passed the last straggling cabin of the town, their way lay along
a sandy road, flanked by fields green with corn and cotton, broken by
stretches of scraggy pine and oak, growing upon land once under
cultivation, but impoverished by the wasteful methods of slavery; land
that had never been regenerated, and was now no longer tilled. Negroes
were working in the fields, birds were singing in the trees. Buzzards
circled lazily against the distant sky. Although it was only early
summer, a languor in the air possessed the colonel's senses, and
suggested a certain charity toward those of his neighbours--and they
were most of them--who showed no marked zeal for labour.

"Work," he murmured, "is best for happiness, but in this climate
idleness has its compensations. What, in the end, do we get for all
our labour?"

"Fifty cents a day, an' fin' yo'se'f, suh," said Peter, supposing the
soliloquy