t
their audience behind them on the great plantation, but they still sang to
the empty road and courtesied to the cedars upon the way. Excitement
gripped them like a frenzy--and a childish joy in a coming change blended
with a mother's yearning over broken ties.

A bright mulatto led, standing at full height, and her rich notes rolled
like an organ beneath the shrill plaint of her companions. She was large,
deep-bosomed, and comely after her kind, and in her careless gestures there
was something of the fine fervour of the artist. She sang boldly, her full
body rocking from side to side, her bared arms outstretched, her long
throat swelling like a bird's above the gaudy handkerchief upon her breast.

The others followed her, half artlessly, half in imitation, mingling with
their words grunts of self-approval. A grin ran from face to face as if
thrown by the grotesque flash of a lantern. Only a little black woman
crouching in one corner bowed herself and wept.

The children had fallen back against the stone wall, where they hung
staring.

"Good-by, Dolly!" they called cheerfully, and the woman answered with a
long-drawn, hopeless whine:--

"Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Meet agin."

Zeke broke from the group and ran a few steps beside the wagon, shaking the
outstretched hands.

The driver nodded peaceably to him, and cut with a single stroke of his
whip an intricate figure in the sand of the road. "Git up an' come along
with us, sonny," he said cordially; but Zeke only grinned in reply, and the
children laughed and waved their handkerchiefs from the wall. "Good-by,
Dolly, and Mirandy, and Sukey Sue!" they shouted, while the women, bowing
over the rolling wheels, tossed back a fragment of the song:--

"We hope ter meet you in heaven, whar we'll
Part no mo',
Whar we'll part no mo';
Gawd A'moughty bless you twel we
Me--et a--gin."

"Twel we meet agin," chirped the little girls, tripping into the chorus.

Then, with a last rumble, the wagon went by, and Zeke came trotting back
and straddled the stone wall, where he sat looking down upon the loose
poppies that fringed the yellowed edge of the wheat.

"Dey's gwine way-way f'om hyer, Marse Champe," he said dreamily. "Dey's
gwine right spang over dar whar de sun done come f'om."

"Colonel Minor bought 'em," Champe explained, sliding from the wall, "and
he bought Dolly dirt cheap--I heard Uncle say so--" With a grin he looked
up at the