nybody would know it
that had any jedgment at all. You's a perfect gentleman, sah." He was
too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.

I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night--about his old
master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer
("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things. He had lived a
long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it
over. So it will be with us, if we live so long. May we find once in a
while a patient listener.

This patriarch's unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored
people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who
expressed himself quite as emphatically. He was brought up among white
people ("I's been taughted a heap," he said), and believed that the
salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy. But
he was less perspicacious than the older man. He was one of the very few
persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a
Yankee. "Are you a legislator-man?" he asked, at the end of our talk.
The legislature was in session on the hill. But perhaps, after all, he
only meant to flatter me.

If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the
going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage. The estate
itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has
fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and
occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a
larger cabin. It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman
whom I met at St. Augustine. He had come to Florida against his will,
the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking
at everything through very blue spectacles. "Have you seen any of those
fine old country mansions," he asked, "about which we read so often in
descriptions of Southern, life?" He had been on the lookout for them, he
averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and
from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a
"fine old mansion" must be different from his.

The Murat house, certainly, was never a palace, except as love may have
made it so. But it was old; people had lived in it, and died in it;
those who once owned it, whose name and memory still clung to it, were
now in narrower houses; and it was easy for the visitor--for one
visitor, at least--to fall