nection with it, and lent the topic attractions. Tom had been shrewdly
right in saying that his talk of it would give it a chance.

He went often to the house near the Circle. Latimer did not go with him,
and had himself explained his reasons to big Tom.

"I have seen her," he said. "It is better that I should not see her
often. She is too much like her mother."

But Baird seemed to become by degrees one of the household. Gradually--and
it did not take long--Tom and he were familiar friends. They had long
talks together, they walked side by side through the streets, they went in
company to see the men it was necessary to hold interviews with. Their
acquaintance became an intimacy which established itself with curious
naturalness. It was as if they had been men of the same blood, who, having
spent their lives apart, on meeting, found pleasure in the discovery of
their relationship. The truth was that for the first time in his life big
Tom enjoyed a friendship with a man who was educated and, in a measure, of
the world into which he himself had been born. Baird's world had been that
of New England, his own, the world of the South; but they could comprehend
each other's parallels and precedents, and argue from somewhat similar
planes. In the Delisleville days Tom had formed no intimacies, and had
been a sort of Colossus set apart; in the mountains of North Carolina he
had consorted with the primitive and uneducated in good-humoured, even
grateful, friendliness; but he had mentally lived like a hermit. To have
talked to Jabe Doty or Nath Hayes on any other subjects than those of
crops and mountain politics or sermons would have been to bewilder them
hopelessly. To find himself in mental contact with a man who had lived and
thought through all the years during which he himself had vegetated at the
Cross-roads, was a wonderful thing to him. He realised that he had long
ago given up expecting anything approaching such companionship, and that
to indulge in it was to live in a new world. Baird's voice, his choice of
words, his readiness and tact, the very carriage of his fine, silvering
head, produced on him the effect of belonging to a new species of human
being.

"You are all the things I have been missing for half a lifetime," he
said. "I didn't know what it was I was making up my mind to going
without--but it was such men as you."

On his own part, Baird felt he had made a rich discovery also. The large
humour and sweetn