t one step farther." I went to that tree at the exact turn
of the bend, and then I went--farther; for I found there one solemn,
lonely old house. Now, if there had been two, I should not have gone on;
I should not have broken my compact. Two houses are sociable and
commonplace; but one all alone on a desolate waste like that inspired me
with--let us call it interest, and I went forward.

It was a lodge rather than a house; in its best day it could never have
been more than a very plain abode, and now, in its worst, it seemed to
have fallen into the hands of Giant Despair. "Forlorn" was written over
its lintels, and "without hope" along its low roof-edge. Raised high
above the ground, in the Southern fashion, on wooden supports, it seemed
even more unstable than usual to Northern eyes, because the
lattice-work, the valance, as it were, which generally conceals the
bare, stilt-like underpinning, was gone, and a thin calf and some
melancholy chickens were walking about underneath, as though the place
was an arbor. There was a little patch of garden, but no grass, no
flowers; everything was gray, the unpainted house, the sand of the
garden-beds, and the barren waste stretching away on all sides. At first
I thought the place was uninhabited, but as I drew nearer a thin smoke
from one of the chimneys told of life within, and I said to myself that
the life would be black-skinned life, of course. For I was quite
accustomed now to finding the families of the freedmen crowded into just
such old houses as this, hidden away in unexpected places; for the
freedmen hardly ever live up on the even ground in the broad sunshine as
though they had a right there, but down in the hollows or out into the
fringes of wood, where their low-roofed cabins, numerous though they may
be, are scarcely visible to the passer-by. There was no fence around
this house; it stood at large on the waste as though it belonged there.
Take away the fence from a house, and you take away its respectability;
it becomes at once an outlaw. I ascended the crazy, sunken steps that
led to the front door, and lifted the knocker that hung there as if in
mockery; who ever knocked there now save perhaps a river-god with his
wet fingers as he hurried by, mounted on the foaming freshet, to ravage
and lay waste again the poor, desolate fields? But no spirit came to the
door, neither came the swarm of funny little black faces I had expected;
instead, I saw before me a white woma