en't got the gift of seeing things, and it seems
strange that the A'mighty should shower it on a coloured girl and leave a
white woman wanting; but it appears to be the A'mighty knows his own
business, so I don't grumble. Now I'm going to show you the house and your
room. I've given you a room looking right on the garden, this side. You've
noticed how all our houses here are built with their sides facing the
street and their fronts facing the garden, or maybe you haven't noticed it
yet, but you will. 'Pears to me our ancestors had some sense in their
heads, even though they didn't invent telegraphs to send bad news in a
hurry and railway cars to smash people to bits, and telephones to let
strangers talk right into one's house just by ringing a bell. Not that I'd
let one into Vernons. You may hunt high or low, garret or basement, you
won't find one of those boxes of impudence in Vernons--not while I have
servants to go my messages."

Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept
it out, making Richard Pinckney's life a tissue of small inconveniences,
and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of
inferior people, "Plumb crazy."

She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall.

The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a
stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons,
shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from
England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather's clock, with
the maker's name and address, "Whewel. Coggershall," blazoned on its brass
face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was
ruling at St. James's in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial
in their pomp and vanity.

Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through
the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell,
the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, spacious afternoons
filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons
of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of
hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat
held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door
leading to the servants' quarters suddenly left open a voice would come,
the voice of some darky singing whilst at work.

A snatch of the South mix