ing look that always met your eye from the eager face of the
diminutive wearer of second-hand coats and silk hats.

"Yas, I'm named 'Pollo Belvedere, an' my marster gi'e me dat intitlemint
on account o' my shape," he would say, with a strut, on occasion, if he
were bantered, for he had learned that the name held personal
suggestions which it took a little bravado to confront. Evidently
Apollo's master was a humorist.

Apollo had always been a house-servant, and had for several years served
with satisfaction as coachman to his master's family; but after the
breaking up, when the place went into other hands, he failed to find
favor with the new-comers, who had an eye for conventional form, and so
Apollo was under the necessity of accepting lower rank on the place as a
field-hand. But he entered plantation circles with his head up. He had
his house rearing, his toilets, and his education--all distinguishing
possessions in his small world--and he was, in his way, quite a
gentleman. Apollo could read a chapter from the Bible without stopping
to spell. He seized his words with snap-shots and pronounced them with
genius. Indeed, when not limited by the suggestions of print, as when on
occasion he responded to an invitation to lead in public prayer, he was
a builder of words of so noble and complex architecture that one hearing
him was pleased to remember that the good Lord, being omniscient, must
of course know all tongues, and would understand.

That the people of the plantation thought well of Apollo will appear
from the fact that he was more than once urged to enter the ministry;
but this he very discreetly declined to do, and for several reasons. In
the first place he didn't feel "called to preach"; and in the second
place he did feel called or impelled to play the fiddle; and more than
that, he liked to play dance music, and to have it "danced by."

As Apollo would have told you himself, the fact that he had never
married was not because he couldn't get anybody to have him, but simply
that he hadn't himself been suited. And, indeed, it is because of the
romance of his life that Apollo comes at all into this little sketch
that bears his name. Had he not been so pathetic in his serious and
grotesque personality, the story would probably have borne the name of
its heroine, Miss Lily Washington, of Lone Oak Plantation, and would
have concerned a number of other people.

Lily was a beauty in her own right, and she was bell