Huberts Wife | Page 3

to the delight and constant spitting of the performer. This operation, so prevalent both among white and black women of the South, is called "dipping snuff."
Having followed our sable friends from grief to indignation, and from indignation to the charming amusement of snuff-dipping, we will enter the house and make acquaintance with its master.
CHAPTER II.
THE MASTER'S CONFERENCE WITH HIMSELF.
It was late in September, and chilly for the season. A bright fire glowed upon the hearth in the "lady's chamber" at Kennons. Red curtains shaded the windows, and drooped in folds to the floor. Roses and green leaves seemed springing up out of the carpet to meet the light and warmth that radiated from the small semicircle behind the glittering fender. A bed hung with white curtains, a dressing bureau, with its fancy pincushion, and numerous cut-glass bottles of perfumery, a lounge covered with bright patchwork, and furnished with log-cabin cushions, easy-chairs and ottomans, together with the workstand and its inseparable little basket filled with every indispensable for needlework--all, all bore the trace of woman's hand.
For nine years this had been the loved family-room of Duncan and Ellice Lisle.
Now, Ellice was forever gone. Her foot had passed the threshold, to come in, to go out, no more. Her canary hung in the window; how could he sing on the morrow, missing her accustomed voice? Her picture hung over the mantle, looking down with the old-time brightness upon the the solitary figures beforefire--Duncan and his child.
Hubert, the son, in his eighth year, sitting clasped in his father's arms, had pierced anew that tortured heart by asking questions about his mother and the mystery of death, which no human mind can answer. The child was in a vortex of wonder, grief and speculation. It was the first great lesson of his life, and he would learn it well, the more that it was so severe and incomprehensible. But sleep and fatigue overcame Hubert at length. The light from the fire no more danced with his shifting curls, but settled down in a steady golden glow over the mass that mingled its yellow-brown with the black beard of the stricken man. For the father would not lay away his sleeping child. He held him close, as the something, the all that was left to him of his lost love. His head drooped low and his lips rested in a long embrace of the child's soft wealth of hair.
Mayhap some watching spirit took pity upon the man bereaved; for while he gazed into the fire, the heavy pressure of the present yielded to a half-conscious memory of the past, and a dream-like reverie brightened and darkened, flickered and burned in and out with the red of the flame, and the white of the ashes.
Duncan Lisle was a boy again. With two little brothers and a half-dozen black child-retainers, he hunted in the woods of Kennons, sailed boats on the red waters of the Roanoke, rode break-neck races over the old fields, despising fences high, and ditches deep, and vigorously sought specimens of uncouth, out-of-the-way beast, bird and insect. He studied mathematics and classics, played pranks upon one tutor, and did loving reverence to another. He planted flowers upon his own mother's grave, and filled the vases of his stepmother with her own favorite lilacs and roses. He made houses, carriages, swings, sets of furniture, and all sorts of constructions for his half-sister Della, who was his junior by ten years at least.
He edified, not to say terrified, the dusky crowd of juveniles with jack-o'-lanterns, impromptu giants and brigands, false faces, fire crackers, ventriloquism and sleight-of-hand performances.
With a decided propensity for fun and mischief, there was also in his disposition as evident a proclivity to seriousness and earnestness. If it gave him delight to play off upon a stranger the joke of "bagging the game," he enjoyed with equal ardor the correct rendering of a difficult translation, or the solution of an intricate problem.
If sometimes he annoyed with his untimely jest, he always won by his manly openness and uniform kindliness of nature. He cherished love for all that was around him, both animate and lifeless. Soul and Nature therefore rendered back to him their meed of harmonious sympathy.
Duncan was scarcely seventeen when the Plague swept over Kennons. That mysterious blight, rising in the orient, traveling darkly and surely unto the remotest West, laid its blackened hand upon the fair House of Kennons.
Cholera! fearful by name and by nature, it was not so strange that thy skeleton fingers should clutch at the myriad-headed city, situate by river and by sea, but thou wert insatiable! Proud dwellings and lowly cots in green fields and midst waving woods thou didst not spare; for thy victim, the human form, was there.
In the middle of August, the skies shone over