onies. But there--I told you you couldn't understand." He leaned
back against the wall again, and took up the great pipe, which looked as
though it must consume whatever small store of strength remained to him.

"Is it what is called an opera you want to write, like--like the
'Creation,' for instance?" asked Deal. The "Creation" was the only long
piece of music he had ever heard.

Carl groaned. "Oh, _don't_ talk of it!" he said; then added, irritably,
"It's a song, that's all--the song of a Southern swamp."

"Call it by it's real name, Devil," said the elder brother, grimly.

"I would, if I was rich enough to have a picture painted--the Spirit of
the Swamp--a beautiful woman, falsely called a devil by cowards, dark,
languorous, mystical, sleeping among the vines I saw up there, with the
great red blossoms dropping around her."

"And the great mottled snakes coiling over her?"

"I didn't see any snakes."

"Well," said Mark, refilling his pipe, "now I'm going to tell you _my_
story. When I met you on that windy pier at Exton, and proposed that you
should come down here with me, I was coming myself, in any case, wasn't
I? And why? I wanted to get to a place where I could be warm--warm, hot,
baked; warm through and through; warm all the time. I wanted to get to
a place where the very ground was warm. And _now_--I'll tell you why."

He rose from his seat, laid down his pipe, and, extending his hand,
spoke for about fifteen minutes without pause. Then he turned, went back
hastily to the old chimney, where red coals still lingered, and sat down
close to the glow, leaving Carl wonder-struck in his tilted chair. The
elder man leaned over the fire and held his hands close to the coals;
Carl watched him. It was nine o'clock, and the thermometer marked
eighty.

For nearly a month after Christmas, life on the old plantation went on
without event or disaster. Carl, with his crutch and cane, could not
walk far; his fancy now was to limp through the east orange-aisle to the
place of tombs, and sit there for hours, playing softly, what might be
called crooning, on his violin. The place of tombs was a small, circular
space surrounded by wild orange-trees in a close, even row, like a
hedge; here were four tombs, massive, oblong blocks of the white
conglomerate of the coast, too coarse-grained to hold inscription or
mark of any kind. Who the old Spaniards were whose bones lay beneath,
and what names they bore in the flesh, no one