-open door. When I closed an eye and peeped through the crack, I
could see my mother's tall shadow, shifting, not flitting, on the
whitewashed wall of the kitchen, as she passed back and forth from the
stove to the wooden cradle in which my little sister Jessy lay asleep,
with the head of her rag doll in her mouth.

Outside the splash! splash! of the rain still sounded on the brick
pavement, and as I glanced through the window, I saw an old blind negro
beggar groping under the street lamp at the corner. The muffled beat of
his stick in the drenched leaves passed our doorstep, and I heard it
grow gradually fainter as he turned in the direction of the negro hovels
that bordered our end of the town. Across the street, and on either side
of us, there were rows of small boxlike frame houses built with narrow
doorways, which opened from the sidewalk into funny little kitchens,
where women, in soiled calico dresses, appeared to iron all day long. It
was the poorer quarter of what is known in Richmond as "Church Hill," a
portion of the city which had been left behind in the earlier
fashionable progress westward. Between us and modern Richmond there were
several high hills, up which the poor dripping horses panted on summer
days, a railroad station, and a broad slum-like bottom vaguely described
as the "Old Market." Our prosperity, with our traditions, had crumbled
around us, yet there were still left the ancient church, with its shady
graveyard, and an imposing mansion or two inherited from the forgotten
splendour of former days. The other Richmond--that "up-town" I heard
sometimes mentioned--I had never seen, for my early horizon was bounded
by the green hill, by the crawling salmon-coloured James River at its
foot, and by the quaint white belfry of the parish of old St. John's.
Beneath that belfry I had made miniature graves on summer afternoons,
and as I sat now opposite to my father, with the bright fire between us,
the memory of those crumbling vaults made me hug myself in the warmth,
while I edged nearer the great black kettle singing before the flames.

"Pa," I asked presently, with an effort to resume the conversation along
cheerful lines, "was it a he or a she pup?"

My father turned his bright blue eyes from the fire, while his hand
wandered, with an habitual gesture, to his coarse straw-coloured hair
which stood, like mine, straight up from the forehead.

"Wall, I'll be blessed if I can recollect, Benjy," he replie