nd looked after him, while he ploughed, wiping his forehead, up
the long hill, under the leaves of mulberry and catalpa trees, I felt
instinctively that my future triumphs would be in a measure the
overthrow of the things for which he and his generation had stood. The
manager's casual phrase "the old families," had bred in me a secret
resentment, for I knew in my heart that the genial aristocracy,
represented by the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic
Railroad, was in reality the enemy, and not the friend, of such as I.

The long, hot summer unfolded slowly while I trudged to the factory in
the blinding mornings and back again to the Old Market at the
suffocating hour of sunset. Over the doors of the negro hovels luxuriant
gourd vines hung in festoons of large fan-shaped leaves, and above the
high plank fences at the back, gaudy sunflowers nodded their heads to me
as I went wearily by. The richer quarter of the city had blossomed into
a fragrant bower, but I saw only the squalid surroundings of the Old
Market, with its covered wagons, its overripe melons, its prowling dogs
hunting in refuse heaps, and beyond this the crooked street, which led
to the tobacco factory and then sagged slowly down to the river-bottom.
Sometimes I would lean from my little window at night into the stifling
atmosphere, where the humming of a mosquito, or the whirring of a moth,
made the only noise, and think of the enchanted garden lying desolate
and lovely under the soft shining of the stars. Were the ghosts moving
up and down the terraces in the mazes of scented box, I wondered? Then
the garden would fade far away from me into a cool, still distance,
while I knelt with my head in my hands, panting for breath in the
motionless air. Outside the shadow of the Old Market lay over all,
stretching sombre and black to where I crouched, a lonely, half-naked
child at my attic window. And so at last, bathed in sweat, I would fall
asleep, to awaken at dawn when the covered wagons passed through the
streets below, and the cry of "Wa-ter-mil-lion! Wa-ter-mil-lion!" rang
in the silence. Then the sun would rise slowly, the day begin, and Mrs.
Chitling's cheerful bustle would start anew. Tired, sleepless,
despairing, I would set off to work at last, while the Great South
Midland Railroad receded farther and farther into the dim province of
inaccessible things.

After a long August day, when the factory had shut down while it was yet
afternoon