f his
Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the
original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed
little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom
that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded.
Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence. They were the pride
of our hearts.

As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower
floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one
had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed
on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So
long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in. The silk
quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as
yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying
Dutchman's sails. This room was of almost monastic severity: an
ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it. Besides the bed
it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a
shaving-stand. On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar
with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick
turned as black as iron. The press in the corner still held a few
clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry
letters and a Business Book--at least, that's how it was
marked--with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set
down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves. On the
fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, "_Freeman
Hynds_."

"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his
room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they
shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."

We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to
raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name,
only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as
he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad
man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy
face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really
lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we
were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and
whose lives it had wrecked.

We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out
of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and
wind. Over in one corner, pushed