Beverley of old in Virginia, and riding as lightly and gracefully
as a bird on the wing.

There were two other watchers besides the Colonel. These two stood at
the drawing-room window. One was tall and black and kind-eyed, with
the unquenchable kindness of the colored race. His official name was
Solomon Ezekiel Pickup, but ever since Mrs. Fortescue, as Betty
Beverley, had taken him, a little waif, forlorn and homeless and
friendless, he had been simply Kettle, being as black as a kettle. He
had watched and adored the baby days of "Marse Beverley," the straight
young stripling now training to be a soldier at West Point, and Anita,
the violet-eyed daughter, the adored of her father's heart, but Kettle
had not come into his own until the two-year-old baby, John Hope
Fortescue II, had arrived in a world which did not expect him, but
welcomed him the more rapturously on that account. The new baby had
taken everybody by surprise, and immediately acquired the name of the
After-Clap. He coolly approved of his father and mother, and thought
Anita an entertaining person when she got down on the floor to play
with him. Naturally he was indifferent to his twenty-year-old brother,
whom he had never seen, but Kettle--his own Kettle--was the beloved of
the After-Clap's heart. Next to Kettle in his affections was Mrs.
McGillicuddy, the six-foot-two wife of Sergeant McGillicuddy, who had
eight children, of assorted sizes, and still found time to do a great
deal for the After-Clap.

Mrs. Fortescue, riding briskly across the plaza, and seeing Kettle, so
black, holding in his arms the laughing baby, so white, smiled and
waved her hand at them. Then, catching sight of the Commanding
Officer, standing at the window of his office, she smiled at him. But
Colonel Fortescue was not smiling; on the contrary, he was frowning as
his eyes fell upon Mrs. Fortescue's mount, Birdseye, a light built
black mare, with a shifty eye and a propensity to make free with her
hind feet. More than once Colonel Fortescue had reminded Mrs.
Fortescue that it was somewhat beneath the dignity of a Commanding
Officer's wife to ride a kicking horse. But Mrs. Fortescue had a
sneaking affection for Birdseye and much preferred her to Pretty Maid,
the brown mare Anita rode, and who was considered as demure as Anita,
and Anita was very demure, and very, very pretty. At least, so thought
Lieutenant Victor Broussard, watching her out of the tail of his eye,
as h