end. In spite of the gray monotone to which the
paintless years had reduced the once white weatherboarding and green
Venetian blinds, the house possessed a certain stateliness of style
which was independent of circumstance, and a solidity of construction
that resisted sturdily the disintegrating hand of time. Heart-pine and
live-oak, mused the colonel, like other things Southern, live long
and die hard. The old house had been built of the best materials, and
its woodwork dowelled and mortised and tongued and grooved by men who
knew their trade and had not learned to scamp their work. For the
colonel's grandfather had built the house as a town residence, the
family having owned in addition thereto a handsome country place upon
a large plantation remote from the town.

The colonel had stopped on the opposite side of the street and was
looking intently at the home of his ancestors and of his own youth,
when a neatly dressed coloured girl came out on the piazza, seated
herself in a rocking-chair with an air of proprietorship, and opened
what the colonel perceived to be, even across the street, a copy of a
woman's magazine whose circulation, as he knew from the advertising
rates that French and Co. had paid for the use of its columns, touched
the million mark. Not wishing to seem rude, the colonel moved slowly
on down the street. When he turned his head, after going a rod or two,
and looked back over his shoulder, the girl had risen and was
re-entering the house. Her disappearance was promptly followed by the
notes of a piano, slightly out of tune, to which some one--presumably
the young woman--was singing in a high voice, which might have been
better had it been better trained,

_"I dreamt that I dwe-elt in ma-arble halls
With vassals and serfs at my si-i-ide."_

The colonel had slackened his pace at the sound of the music, but,
after the first few bars, started forward with quickened footsteps
which he did not relax until little Phil's weight, increasing
momentarily, brought home to him the consciousness that his stride was
too long for the boy's short legs. Phil, who was a thoroughbred, and
would have dropped in his tracks without complaining, was nevertheless
relieved when his father's pace returned to the normal.

Their walk led down a hill, and, very soon, to a wooden bridge which
spanned a creek some twenty feet below. The colonel paused for a
moment beside the railing, and looked up and down the stream. I