ity. He
leaned back in his arm-chair, the only one at the station, fingering his
gold-lined silver snuffbox, with its chain and ladle, his eyes dwelling
calmly on the fire, and his thoughts busy with far away and long ago.

He was old enough now to enter into the past as a sort of heritage, a
promised land which memory had glozed with a glamour that can never
shine upon the uncertain aspects of the future. The burning sense of
regret, the anguish of nostalgia, the relinquishment of an accustomed
sphere, its prospects and ideals, the revolt against the uncouth and
rude conditions of the new status, the gradual reluctant naturalization
to a new world,--these were forgotten save as the picturesque elements
of sorrow and despair that balanced the joys, the interest, the
devil-may-care joviality, the adventure, the strange wild
companionship,--all that made the tale worth rehearsing in the flare and
the flicker of the fireside glow.

The rains had come. The dark slate-tinted clouds hung low over the
station, but every log house, freshly dight with whitewash of the marly
clay, after the Indian method, still shone in the shadow as if the sun
were upon it. The turf was green, despite the passing of many feet, and
where a slight depression held water, a few ducks, Carolina bred, were
quacking and paddling about; now and then these were counted with great
interest, for they had a trick of taking to the woods with others of
their kind, and relapsing to savagery,--truly distressing to the
domestic poultry prospects of the station. The doors of the Mivane cabin
were all ajar,--the one at the rear opening into a shed-room, unfloored,
which gave a vista into more sheds, merely roofed spaces, inclosed at
either end. A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the
bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house,
fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat,
giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman,
neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an
expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many
self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and
appropriated the knotty points of the discourse.

In the outer shed, Caesar, clad like the Indians and the pioneers in
buckskin, was mending the plough-gear, and talking with great loquacity
to another negro, of the type known then and later as "the new nigger,"
the targ