t
seemed narrower and more sluggish than his memory had pictured it.
Above him the water ran between high banks grown thick with underbrush
and over-arching trees; below the bridge, to the right of the creek,
lay an open meadow, and to the left, a few rods away, the ruins of the
old Eureka cotton mill, which in his boyhood had harboured a
flourishing industry, but which had remained, since Sherman's army
laid waste the country, the melancholy ruin the colonel had seen it
last, when twenty-five years or more before, he left Clarendon to seek
a wider career in the outer world. The clear water of the creek
rippled harmoniously down a gentle slope and over the site where the
great dam at the foot had stood, while birds were nesting in the vines
with which kindly nature had sought to cloak the dismantled and
crumbling walls.

Mounting the slope beyond the bridge, the colonel's stride now
carefully accommodated to the child's puny step, they skirted a low
brick wall, beyond which white headstones gleamed in a mass of
verdure. Reaching an iron gate, the colonel lifted the latch, and
entered the cemetery which had been the object of their visit.

"Is this the place, papa?" asked the little boy.

"Yes, Phil, but it is farther on, in the older part."

They passed slowly along, under the drooping elms and willows, past
the monuments on either hand--here, resting on a low brick wall, a
slab of marble, once white, now gray and moss-grown, from which the
hand of time had well nigh erased the carved inscription; here a
family vault, built into the side of a mound of earth, from which only
the barred iron door distinguished it; here a pedestal, with a
time-worn angel holding a broken fragment of the resurrection trumpet;
here a prostrate headstone, and there another bending to its fall;
and among them a profusion of rose bushes, on some of which the early
roses were already blooming--scarcely a well-kept cemetery, for in
many lots the shrubbery grew in wild unpruned luxuriance; nor yet
entirely neglected, since others showed the signs of loving care, and
an effort had been made to keep the walks clean and clear.

Father and son had traversed half the width of the cemetery, when they
came to a spacious lot, surrounded by large trees and containing
several monuments. It seemed less neglected than the lots about it,
and as they drew nigh they saw among the tombs a very black and
seemingly aged Negro engaged in pruning a tangled rose