of the little boy to whom it had
been, in his tenderest years, the great wide world, the only world he
knew in the years when, with his black boy Peter, whom his father had
given to him as a personal attendant, he had gone forth to field and
garden, stream and forest, in search of childish adventure. Yonder was
the old academy, where he had attended school. The yellow brick of its
walls had scaled away in places, leaving the surface mottled with pale
splotches; the shingled roof was badly dilapidated, and overgrown here
and there with dark green moss. The cedar trees in the yard were in
need of pruning, and seemed, from their rusty trunks and scant
leafage, to have shared in the general decay. As they drove down the
street, cows were grazing in the vacant lot between the bank, which
had been built by the colonel's grandfather, and the old red brick
building, formerly a store, but now occupied, as could be seen by the
row of boxes visible through the open door, by the post-office.

The little boy, an unusually handsome lad of five or six, with blue
eyes and fair hair, dressed in knickerbockers and a sailor cap, was
also keenly interested in the surroundings. It was Saturday, and the
little two-wheeled carts, drawn by a steer or a mule; the pigs
sleeping in the shadow of the old wooden market-house; the lean and
sallow pinelanders and listless negroes dozing on the curbstone, were
all objects of novel interest to the boy, as was manifest by the light
in his eager eyes and an occasional exclamation, which in a clear
childish treble, came from his perfectly chiselled lips. Only a glance
was needed to see that the child, though still somewhat pale and
delicate from his recent illness, had inherited the characteristics
attributed to good blood. Features, expression, bearing, were marked
by the signs of race; but a closer scrutiny was required to discover,
in the blue-eyed, golden-haired lad, any close resemblance to the
shrewd, dark man of affairs who sat beside him, and to whom this
little boy was, for the time being, the sole object in life.

But for the child the colonel was alone in the world. Many years
before, when himself only a boy, he had served in the Southern army,
in a regiment which had fought with such desperate valour that the
honour of the colonelcy had come to him at nineteen, as the sole
survivor of the group of young men who had officered the regiment. His
father died during the last year of the Civil War,