good
news fo' us niggers, sah. I'se b'longed to the Fahfiel' fam'ly a hund'ed
years, Marse--me and my folks, and I wishes yo' a welcome home,
sah--welcome home, Marse Philip."

Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse, and gripped the
twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway
caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to
Southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal
race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without
bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be
taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he
should be "Marse Philip" as a matter of course, because there had always
been a Marse Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him
than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was
made of had been Southern two hundred years.

The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself,
and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive,
grass-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland
three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park,
through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt
like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at
last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of
desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it
with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with
cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and
comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the
place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that
seemed marked out for him--the life of a writer.

The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as
the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of
his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight
with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes--the great white
house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings
stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves
played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of
paint cracked away, window-panes gone here and there. It stood as if too
proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as
stately as in its prim