odices and full plaited skirts; in summer she wore the same
skirts with loosely fitting white linen sacques, trimmed in delicate
embroideries, with muslin ruffles falling over her plump hands. When she
came to the Hall she brought with her innumerable reminiscences of her
childhood, which she told in a musical voice with girlish laughter.

After his sister's arrival the general discontinued his fitful
overseering. He rose early and spent his long days sitting upon the
front porch, smoking an old briar pipe and reading the Richmond papers.
Occasionally he would ride at a jogging pace round the fields, giving
casual directions to the workers, but as his weight increased he found
it difficult to mount into the saddle, and, at last, desisted from the
attempt. He preferred to sit in peace in his cane rocking chair, looking
down the box walk into the twilight of the cedar avenue, or gazing
placidly beyond the aspens and the well-house to the streaked ribbons of
the ripening corn. It was said that he had never been the same man since
the death of his wife. Certainly he laughed as heartily and his jovial
face had taken a ruddier tint, but there was a superficiality in his
exuberant cheerfulness which told that it was not well rooted below the
surface. His jokes were as ready as ever, but he had fallen into an
absent-minded habit of repetition, and sometimes repeated the same
stories at breakfast and supper. He talked freely of his dead wife, he
even made ill-placed jests about his widowerhood, and he never failed to
kiss a pair of red lips when the chance offered; but, for all that, his
gaze often wandered past the huge sycamore to the family graveyard,
where rank periwinkle grew and mocking-birds nested. Through the long
summer not a Sunday passed that he did not take fresh flowers to one of
the neatly trimmed mounds where the marble headpiece read:

"AMELIA TUCKER,

BELOVED WIFE OF

THOMAS BATTLE,

DIED APRIL 3RD., 18--.

'_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith
the Lord._'"

Sometimes the children were with him, but usually he went alone, and
once or twice he returned with red eyelids and asked for a julep.

There was little to fill his life now, and he divided it between Bernard
and Eugenia, whom he adored, and the negroes, whom he reviled for
diversion and spoiled to make amends.

"They will break me!" he would declare a dozen times a day. "They will
turn me