the base-board. The bedroom he
mentally chose for his own was the plainest of all, and was above the
library, fronting the vagabond garden. It had a great black desk with
many glass-knobbed drawers and a book-rack. The volumes this contained
were mostly of the historical sort: a history of the _Middle Plantation,
Meade's Old Churches,_ and at the end a parchment-bound tome inscribed
_The Valiants of Virginia_.

He lingered longest in a room over whose door was painted _The
Hilarium_. It had evidently been a nursery and schoolroom. Here on
the walls were many shelves wound over with networks of cobwebs, and
piled with the oddest assemblage of toys: wooden and splintered
soldiers that had once been bravely painted, dolls in various states of
worn-outness--one rag doll in a calico dress with shoe-button eyes and
a string of bright glass beads round her neck--a wooden box of marbles,
a tattered boxing-glove. There were school-books, too, thumbed and
dog-eared, from _First Reader_ to Caesar's _Gallic Wars_, with names of
small Valiants scrawled on their fly-leaves. He carefully relocked the
door of this room; he wanted to dust those toys and books with his own
hands.

In the upper hall again he leaned from the window, sniffing the
far-flung scent of orchards and peach-blown fence-rows. The soft
whirring sound of a bird's wing went past, almost brushing his startled
face, and the old oaks seemed to stretch their bent limbs with a
faithful brute-like yawn of pleasure. In the room below he could hear
the vigorous sound of Aunt Daphne's hard-driven broom and the sound
flooded the echoing space with a comfortable commotion.

The present task was one after Aunt Daphne's own heart. A small mountain
of dust was growing on the terrace, and as beneath brush and rag the
colors of wall and parquetry stood forth, her face became one shiny
expanse of ebony satisfaction. When the bulldog, returning from his
jaunt, out-stripping Uncle Jefferson, bounced in to prance against her
she smote him lustily with her scrubbing-brush.

"Git outer heah, yo' good-fo'-nuffin' w'ite rapscallyun! Gwine trapse
yo' muddy feet all ovah dis yeah floor, whut Ah jes' scrubbed tell yo'
marstah kin eat off'n et?" She broke off to listen to Uncle Jefferson's
voice outside, directed toward the upper window.

"Dat yo', suh? Yas, suh, dis me. Well, suh, Ah take ol' Sukey out de Red
Road, en Ah hitch huh ter yo' machine-thing, en she done balk. Won't go
nohow ..