ars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs.
Ming as a conjugal martyr. Being an amiable body--peaceably disposed to
every living creature, with the exception of William--she had hastened
to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule,
when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes
earlier by the Applegate road. As he was a fine looking man of full
habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face
before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was
sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds.

"Thar's nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come back to
Jordan's Journey," she said. "I declar I'd know a Gay by his eyes if I
war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come. He's talkin'
to old Adam Doolittle now," she added, for the information of the maid,
who, being of a curious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees
and was craning her neck toward the door, "I can see his lips movin',
but he speaks so low I can't make out what he says."

"Lemme git dar a minute, Miss Betsey, I'se got moughty sharp years, I
is."

"They're no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn't hear if I stood
an' listened forever. It's about the road most likely, for I see old
Adam a-pintin'."

For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the
mottled face of the tavern. On his head the sunlight shone through
the boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the well, and beyond this the
Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper,
stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the
north.

Starting southward from the cross-roads, the character of the country
underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked as if man, having
contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious
truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike. Passing beyond
them a few steps out of the forest, one found a low hill, on which
the reaped corn stood in stacks like weapons of a vanished army, while
across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, overgrown with broomsedge
and life-everlasting, spread for several miles between "worm fences"
which were half buried in brushwood. To the eyes of the stranger, fresh
from the trim landscapes of England, there was an aspect of desolation
in the neglected roads, in the deserted fields, and in the dim grey
marshes that showed beyo