ave a spring, and bounded away through the tall blue grass.
He was back again in a moment, with a stick in his mouth. Standing
up with his fore paws in the lap of his little mistress, he looked so
wistfully into her face that she could not refuse this invitation for a
romp.

The Colonel chuckled as they went tumbling about in the grass to find
the stick which the child repeatedly tossed away.

He hitched his chair along to the other end of the porch as they kept
getting farther away from the avenue.

It had been many a long year since those old locust-trees had seen a
sight like that. Children never played any more under their dignified
shadows.

Time had been (but they only whispered this among themselves on rare
spring days like this) when the little feet chased each other up and
down the long walk, as much at home as the pewees in the beeches.

Suddenly the little maid stood up straight, and began to sniff the air,
as if some delicious odour had blown across the lawn.

"Fritz," she exclaimed, in delight, "I 'mell 'trawberries!"

The Colonel, who could not hear the remark, wondered at the abrupt pause
in the game. He understood it, however, when he saw them wading through
the tall grass, straight to his strawberry bed. It was the pride of his
heart, and the finest for miles around. The first berries of the season
had been picked only the day before. Those that now hung temptingly red
on the vines he intended to send to his next neighbour, to prove his
boasted claim of always raising the finest and earliest fruit.

He did not propose to have his plans spoiled by these stray guests.
Laying the field-glass in its accustomed place on the little table
beside his chair, he picked up his hat and strode down the walk.

Colonel Lloyd's friends all said he looked like Napoleon, or rather like
Napoleon might have looked had he been born and bred a Kentuckian.

He made an imposing figure in his suit of white duck.

The Colonel always wore white from May till October.

There was a military precision about him, from his erect carriage to the
cut of the little white goatee on his determined chin.

No one looking into the firm lines of his resolute face could imagine
him ever abandoning a purpose or being turned aside when he once formed
an opinion.

Most children were afraid of him. The darkies about the place shook in
their shoes when he frowned. They had learned from experience that "ole
Marse Lloyd had a tigah of