g
delicately, as though they were touching fragile porcelain, yet those same
hands could bend an iron bar, or rein in John Barleycorn even when the bit
was between the said J. B.'s teeth.

"That's the horses," said he, flinging open a coach-house door, "and
that's the shandrydan the governor still drives in when he goes to
Charleston. Look at it. It was made in the forties, and you should see it
with a darkey on the box and Pap inside, and all his luggage behind, and
he going off to Charleston, and the nigger children running after it."

Phyl inspected the mustard-yellow vehicle. Then he closed the door on it,
put up the bar, and, the business of showing things over, did a little
double shuffle as though Phyl were not present, or as though she were a
boy friend and not a strange young woman.

"Say, do you like poetry?" said he, breaking off and seeming suddenly to
remember her presence.

"No," said Phyl. "At least--"

"Well, here's some.

"'There was an old hen and she had a wooden leg, She went to the barn
and she laid a wooden egg, She laid it right down by the barn--don't
you think.'"

"Well?" said she, laughing.

"'It's just about time for another little drink--' some sense in poetry
like that, isn't there? But all the drinks are in the house and I don't
want to go in. I'm hiding from Pap. Last night when he was ratty with
rheumatism, he let out at me, saying the young people weren't any good,
saying Maria Pinckney was the only person he knew with sense in her head,
called me a name because I poured him out a dose of liniment instead of
medicine, by mistake--though he didn't swallow it--and wished Maria was
here. So I just sent Jake, the page boy, off with a wire to her; didn't
tell any one, just sent it. Come on and look at the garden--you've got to
look at the garden, you know."

He led the way past the barn to a farmyard, where hens were clucking and
scratching and scraping in the sunshine; the deep double bass grunting of
pigs came from the sties, by the low wall across which one could see the
country stretching far away, the cotton fields, the woods, all hazed by
the warmth of the afternoon.

"Let's sit down and look at the garden," said he, pointing to a huge log
by the near wall--"and aren't the convolvuluses beautiful?"

"Beautiful," said Phyl, falling into the vein of the other. "And listen to
the roses."

"They grunt like that because it's near dinner time--they're pretty much
like hu