of the gum-tree was in her face. His eyes fell before it, and he
did not speak. The soft footfalls of the horse on the damp ground
sounded distinctly. Overhead the wind rustled among the trees.

As they emerged from the wood and passed the Burr farm they saw Amos
leaning on his gate, looking moodily upon the morning.

"Good-morning, Mr. Burr!" said Eugenia with the pleasant condescension
of the general in her manner. "Fine weather, isn't it?"

He nodded awkwardly and admitted, with a muttered reservation, that the
weather might be worse. Then he looked at Nicholas. "If you ain't got
nothin' better to do I reckon you might lend a hand at the ploughin',"
he surlily suggested.

"Why, so I might," assented Nicholas good-humouredly. "I've a couple of
hours free."

He fastened more securely the branch in the horse's bridle; then,
raising his hat, he turned and vaulted the whitewashed fence, while
Eugenia, touching her horse into a gallop, vanished in the distance of
the open road, blazing her track with scarlet gum leaves that scattered
royally in the wind.

As Nicholas passed the peanut field he nodded pleasantly to the
congregation of negroes assembled for the annual festival called "a
picking." They ranged in degrees from Uncle Ish, the oldest
representative of his race, to Betsey's five-year-old Jeremiah, who had
already been detected in an attempt to filch the nuts from an overturned
shock, and was being soundly admonished by his mother's avenging palm.
The ground was strewn with baskets and buckets of varying dimensions,
into which the nuts were gathered before being consigned to the huge
hamper guarded by Amos Burr. A hoarse clamour, like that produced by a
flock of crows, went up from the animated swarm as it settled to work.

Nicholas crossed to the adjoining field and ploughed deep furrows in the
soil, going into breakfast with the smell of the warm earth about him
and the glow of exercise in his blood. He ate heartily and listened
without remark to the political vagaries of his father. Amos Burr had
been "looking into politics" of late, and his stubborn wits had been
fixed by a grievance. "If he was a fool befo' now, he's a plum fool
now," Marthy Burr had observed dispassionately. "I ain't never seen no
head so level that it could bear the lettin' in of politics. It makes a
fool of a man and a worse fool of a fool. The government's like a mule,
it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to tu