im,
went out upon the back porch and down the steps.

From the steps a narrow path ran by the kitchen, and skirting the
garden-wall, straggled through the orchard and past the house of the
overseer to the big barn and the cabins in the quarters. There was a light
from the barn door, and as he passed he heard the sound of fiddles and the
shuffling steps of the field hands in a noisy "game." The words they sang
floated out into the night, and with the squeaking of the fiddles followed
him along his path.

When he reached the quarters, he went from door to door, asking for his
wife. "Is this Mahaley's cabin?" he anxiously inquired, "and has your
mistress gone by?"

In the first room an old negro woman sat on the hearth wrapping the hair of
her grandchild, and she rose with a courtesy and a smile of welcome. At the
question her face fell and she shook her head.

"Dis yer ain' Mahaley, Marster," she replied. "En dis yer ain' Mahaley's
cabin--caze Mahaley she ain' never set foot inside my do', en I ain' gwine
set foot at her buryin'." She spoke shrilly, moved by a hidden spite, but
the Governor, without stopping, went on along the line of open doors. In
one a field negro was roasting chestnuts in the embers of a log fire, and
while waiting he had fallen asleep, with his head on his breast and his
gnarled hands hanging between his knees. The firelight ran over him, and as
he slept he stirred and muttered something in his dreams.

After the first glance, his master passed him by and moved on to the
adjoining cabin. "Does Mahaley live here?" he asked again and yet again,
until, suddenly, he had no need to put the question for from the last room
he heard a low voice praying, and upon looking in saw his wife kneeling
with her open Bible near the bedside.

With his hat in his hand, he stood within the shadow of the doorway and
waited for the earnest voice to fall silent. Mahaley was dying, this he
saw when his glance wandered to the shrunken figure beneath the patchwork
quilt; and at the same instant he realized how small a part was his in
Mahaley's life or death. He should hardly have known her had he met her
last week in the corn field; and it was by chance only that he knew her now
when she came to die.

As he stood there the burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like
old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death
showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as
mere