of these days."

"That's just what I'm looking after," he answered.

"Why should you care?" she said. "You don't expect her to fetch you a
new bonnet and a hoop skirt seven feet wide." She laughed merrily at
her own speech, which, after all, was but a trifling exaggeration of
the width of a hoop skirt in that time.

Sanford Browne did not laugh, but took his pipe from his mouth, and
stood up a moment, straining his sight once more against the distant
horizon, where the green-blue water of the wide estuary melted into the
blue-green of the sky with hardly a line of demarcation. Then he sat
down and took a dry tobacco leaf lying on a stool beside him and
crushed it to powder by first chafing it between his open hands and
then grinding it in the palm of his left hand, rubbing it with the
thumb of his right in a mortar-and-pestle fashion.

"I've a good deal more reason to look for the Nancy Jane than you have,
Judy. I wrote my factor, you know, to find some trace of my father and
mother, or of my sister Susan, if it took the half of my tobacco crop.
I hope he'll find them this time." Saying this, he filled his cob pipe
with the powdered tobacco, and then rose and walked into the large
western room of the house, which served for kitchen and dining-room. It
was also the weaving-room, and the great heavy-beamed loom stood in the
corner. At the farther end was the vast, smoke-blackened stone
fireplace, with two large rude andirons and a swinging crane. A skillet
and a gridiron stood against the jamb on one side, a hoe for baking hoe
cakes and a little wrought-iron trivet were in order on the other. The
breakfast fire had burned out; only the great backlog, hoary with gray
ashes, lay slumbering at the back of the fireplace. The planter poked
the drift of ashes between the andirons with a green oak stick until he
saw a live coal shining red in the gray about it. This he rolled out
upon the hearth, and then took it between thumb and finger and
deposited it within the bowl of his pipe by a deft motion, which gave
it no time to burn him.

Having got his pipe a-going, he strolled back into the wide passage and
scanned the horizon once more. Judith Browne did not like to see her
husband in this mood. She knew well how vain every exercise of her
wifely arts of diversion would prove when he once fell into this train
of black thoughts; but she could not refrain from essaying the hopeless
task by holding up her apron of homespun cl