' back."

"Who owns the house? Is there no one to see him? has he no friends?"

"House b'long to Mars' Ward's uncle; fine place once, befo' de war; he's
dead now, and dah's nobuddy but Miss Bettina, an' she's gone off
somewhuz. Propah place, sah, fur Mars' Ward--own uncle's house," said
the old slave, loyally striving to maintain the family dignity even
then.

"Are there no better rooms--no furniture?"

"Sartin; but--but Miss Bettina, she took de keys; she didn't know we was
comin'--"

"You had better send for Miss Bettina, I think," said the keeper,
starting homeward with his tray, washing his hands, as it were, of any
future responsibility in the affair.

The next day he worked in his garden, for clouds veiled the sun and
exercise was possible; but, nevertheless, he could not forget the white
face on the old rug. "Pshaw!" he said to himself, "haven't I seen
tumble-down old houses and battered human beings before this?"

At evening came a violent thunderstorm, and the splendor of the heavens
was terrible. "We have chained you mighty spirit," thought the keeper as
he watched the lightning, "and some time we shall learn the laws of the
winds and foretell the storms; then, prayers will no more be offered in
churches to alter the weather than they would be offered now to alter an
eclipse. Yet back of the lightning and the wind lies the power of the
great Creator, just the same."

But still into his musings crept, with shadowy persistence, the white
face on the rug.

"Nonsense!" he exclaimed; "if white faces are going around as ghosts,
how about the fourteen thousand white faces that went under the sod down
yonder? If they could arise and walk, the whole State would be filled
and no more carpet-baggers needed." So, having balanced the one with the
fourteen thousand, he went to bed.

Daylight brought rain--still, soft, gray rain; the next morning showed
the same, and the third likewise, the nights keeping up their part with
low-down clouds and steady pattering on the roof. "If there was a river
here, we should have a flood," thought the keeper, drumming idly on his
window-pane. Memory brought back the steep New England hillsides
shedding their rain into the brooks, which grew in a night to torrents
and filled the rivers so that they overflowed their banks; then,
suddenly, an old house in a sunken corner of a waste rose before his
eyes, and he seemed to see the rain dropping from a moldy ceiling on the
straw wher