he general and drew him to his
chair. He was failing rapidly; this she saw and suffered at seeing.
There were wrinkles crossing and recrossing his hanging cheeks, and
swollen bluish pockets beneath his eyes. When he moved he carried his
great weight uneasily. During the day she hung over him with multiplied
caresses; as he sat upon the porch in the afternoon she read to him from
the Bible and Shakespeare, the only books his library contained.

"After God and Shakespeare, what was left for any man to write?" the
general had once demanded of the judge.

Now he asked the question of Eugenia, and she smiled and was silent. Her
eyes passed from the porch to the lawn and the walk and the immemorial
gloom of the great cedars. Sunshine lay over all the warm, sleepy land,
and sunshine lay across her white dress and across the senile droop of
the general's mouth.

"For He maketh sore, and bindeth up," read the girl slowly. "He woundeth
and His hands make whole."

"He shall deliver thee in six troubles;--yea, in seven there shall no
evil touch thee."

"In famine He shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the power of
the sword."

She stopped suddenly and looked up, for the general's eyes were full of
tears.

BOOK III

WHEN FIELDS LIE FALLOW

I

On an October afternoon Nicholas Burr was walking along the branch road
that led to his father's farm. He carried a well filled bag upon his
shoulder, the musty surface of which betrayed that it contained freshly
ground meal, but, despite the additional weight, his figure was
unflinchingly erect. There was a splendid vigour in his thick-set frame
and in the swinging strides of his hardy limbs. His face--the
square-jawed, large-featured face of a philosopher or a
farmer--possessed, with its uncompromising ugliness, a certain eccentric
power. Rugged, gray, alert-eyed as it was, large-browed and overhung by
his waving red hair--it was a face to attract or to repel--not to be
ignored.

Now, as he swung on vigorously in the October light, there was about him
a joyousness of purpose which belonged to his age and his aspirations.
It was an atmosphere, an emanation thrown off by respiring vitality.

Across the road the sunshine fell in long, level shafts. The spirit of
October was abroad in the wood--veiling itself in a faint, bluish haze
like the smoke of the greenwood when it burns. Overhead, crimson and
yellow ran riot among the trees, the flame of the maple