ays a
tur'able lot er fuss gwine on w'en de chillen begin ter come up f'om de
fields. 'T wuz becase uv oner dem ar boys dat I sont fur you," she
pursued. "He went plum outer his haid yestiddy en fout wid a w'ite man
down yonder at Cross's Co'nder, en dar's gwine ter be trouble about'n
hit des ez sho' ez you live."

Seated on the flat stone, with her hands hanging over her knees, and her
turbaned head swaying gently back and forth as she talked, she waited as
tranquilly as the rock waited for the inevitable processes of nature.
The patience in her look was the dumb patience of inanimate things; and
her half-bared feet, protruding from the broken soles of her shoes, were
encrusted with the earth of the fields until one could hardly
distinguish them from the ground on which they rested.

"It looks as if there was something like a fight down yonder by the
blasted pine," said the rector, rising from his chair. "I reckon I'd
better go and see what they're quarrelling about."

The negress rose also, and her dim eyes followed him while he went down
the little path between the borders of oyster shells. As he turned into
the open stretch of the road, he glanced back at her, and stopping for a
moment, waved his hand with a gesture that was careless and reassuring.
The fight, or whatever it was that made the noise, was still some
distance ahead in the shadow of the pine-tree, and as he walked towards
it he was thinking casually of other matters--of the wretched condition
of the road after the winter rains, of the need of greater thrift among
the farmers, both white and black, of the touch of indigestion which
still troubled him. There was nothing to warn him that he was
approaching the supreme event in his life, nothing to prepare him for a
change beside which all the changes of the past would appear as
unsubstantial as shadows. His soul might have been the soul in the
grass, so little did its coming or its going affect the forces around
him.

"If this shooting pain keeps up, I'll have to get a prescription from
Doctor Fraser," he thought, and the next minute he cried out suddenly:
"God help us!" and began to run down the road in the direction of the
blasted pine. There was hardly a breath between the instant when he had
thought of his indigestion and the instant when he had called out
sharply on the name of God, yet that flash of time had been long enough
to change the ordinary man into the hero. The spark of greatness in his