ere it warmed
its sinuous length through the middle of its wide battle-field. The
turnpike, coming northward from Suez, emerged, white, dusty, and badly
broken, on the southern border of this waste, and crossed the creek at
right angles. Eastward, westward, the prospect widened away in soft
heavings of fallow half ruined by rains. The whole landscape seemed
bruised and torn, its beauty not gone, but ravished. A distant spot of
yellow was wheat, a yet farther one may have been rye. Off on the right
a thin green mantle that only half clothed the red shoulder of a rise
along the eastern sky was cotton, the sometime royal claimant,
unsceptred, but still potent and full of beauty. About the embers of a
burned dwelling, elder, love-pop, and other wild things spread
themselves in rank complacency, strange bed-fellows adversity had thrust
in upon the frightened sweet-Betsy, phlox and jonquils of the ruined
garden. Here the ground was gay with wild roses, and yonder blue, pink,
white, and purple with expanses of larkspur.

A few steps to the left of the pike near the wood's strong shade, a
beautiful brown horse in gray and yellow trappings suddenly lifted his
head from the clover and gazed abroad.

"He knows there's been fighting here," said a sturdy voice from the
thicket of ripe blackberries behind; "he sort o' smells it."

"Reckon he hears something," responded a younger voice farther from the
road. "Maybe it's C'nelius's yodle; he's been listening for it for a
solid week."

"He's got a good right to," came the first voice again; "worthless as
that boy is, nobody ever took better care of a horse. I wish I had just
about two dozen of his beat biscuit right now. He didn't have his equal
in camp for beat biscuit."

"When sober," suggested the younger speaker, in that melodious Southern
drawl so effective in dry satire; but the older voice did not laugh. One
does not like to have another's satire pointed even at one's nigger.

The senior presently resumed a narrative made timely by the two having
just come through the town. "You must remember I inherited no means and
didn't get my education without a long, hard fight. A thorough clerical
education's no mean thing to get."

"Couldn't the church help you?"

"Oh--yes--I, ch--I did have church aid, but----Well, then I was three
years a circuit rider and then I preached four years here in Suez. And
then I married. Folks laugh about preachers always marrying fortunes--it
was