been among the live-oaks, so the world of
the workers has been among the pines. Back of the great house you come
to the clearing dotted with cabins that belong to the period before the
war, rough affairs of hewn logs, well-ventilated by their many cracks.
Whether of logs or the more modern clapboard, they are all set on
supports away from the earth, and under their flooring hens with their
chickens move about industriously scratching with their toes and
penetrating the inhospitable-looking sand with their strong beaks.
Occasionally a dog or a pig joins them and there is a general, but since
they are all good friends, quite senseless cackle of dissent. Numberless
weeds grow in the sand and flowers are about all the cabins; in the
spring, violets and red lilies, in the summer, cosmos and zinnias, and
the year through, red roses at the cabin doors.

Kindly monotony has been the keynote of Merryvale. To live on what you
have, parting when necessary with a piece of timberland among the pines
or a stretch of acres at the waterfront, this has been the history for
many years at the great house. And monotony has triumphed, too, among
the pines. After the war there were heart-throbbings and a sense of
portentous changes; but when freedom had come and gone; when the Negro
learned that he was still wholly dependent upon his old master, a
liberated laborer but without the tools that made possible a new life,
he turned to work again in his old surroundings at his familiar tasks.
Industrious and ambitious colored fathers and mothers at Merryvale had
been known to save enough to buy their homes; but their children, fed
too by ambition, left them for the North. Thus Aunt Lucindy had a son
who was head waiter in a hotel in Philadelphia, and Brother Jonathan's
daughter made a thousand dollars a year teaching school in Washington.
These depletions, so common in the country that pours her best stock
into the city, held the settlement back. Altogether, the old place was
full of pleasant, uneventful life touched with kindly decay.

And then Merryvale experienced a change. It came to black Merryvale
first. In 1905 the colored school lacked a teacher and the colored
Methodist church a preacher. These positions had been held by the same
person who, to the lasting benefit of the community, was called to a
wider field. Word came that the Church was sending a worthy and
well-known brother who had filled a pulpit in a distant city, but whose
failin