The Colonels Dream | Page 8

For the colonel's grandfather
had built the house as a town residence, the family having owned in
addition thereto a handsome country place upon a large plantation
remote from the town.
The colonel had stopped on the opposite side of the street and was
looking intently at the home of his ancestors and of his own youth,
when a neatly dressed coloured girl came out on the piazza, seated
herself in a rocking-chair with an air of proprietorship, and opened
what the colonel perceived to be, even across the street, a copy of a
woman's magazine whose circulation, as he knew from the advertising
rates that French and Co. had paid for the use of its columns, touched
the million mark. Not wishing to seem rude, the colonel moved slowly
on down the street. When he turned his head, after going a rod or two,
and looked back over his shoulder, the girl had risen and was
re-entering the house. Her disappearance was promptly followed by the
notes of a piano, slightly out of tune, to which some one--presumably
the young woman--was singing in a high voice, which might have been
better had it been better trained,
"I dreamt that I dwe-elt in ma-arble halls With vassals and serfs at my
si-i-ide."
The colonel had slackened his pace at the sound of the music, but, after

the first few bars, started forward with quickened footsteps which he
did not relax until little Phil's weight, increasing momentarily, brought
home to him the consciousness that his stride was too long for the boy's
short legs. Phil, who was a thoroughbred, and would have dropped in
his tracks without complaining, was nevertheless relieved when his
father's pace returned to the normal.
Their walk led down a hill, and, very soon, to a wooden bridge which
spanned a creek some twenty feet below. The colonel paused for a
moment beside the railing, and looked up and down the stream. It
seemed narrower and more sluggish than his memory had pictured it.
Above him the water ran between high banks grown thick with
underbrush and over-arching trees; below the bridge, to the right of the
creek, lay an open meadow, and to the left, a few rods away, the ruins
of the old Eureka cotton mill, which in his boyhood had harboured a
flourishing industry, but which had remained, since Sherman's army
laid waste the country, the melancholy ruin the colonel had seen it last,
when twenty-five years or more before, he left Clarendon to seek a
wider career in the outer world. The clear water of the creek rippled
harmoniously down a gentle slope and over the site where the great
dam at the foot had stood, while birds were nesting in the vines with
which kindly nature had sought to cloak the dismantled and crumbling
walls.
Mounting the slope beyond the bridge, the colonel's stride now
carefully accommodated to the child's puny step, they skirted a low
brick wall, beyond which white headstones gleamed in a mass of
verdure. Reaching an iron gate, the colonel lifted the latch, and entered
the cemetery which had been the object of their visit.
"Is this the place, papa?" asked the little boy.
"Yes, Phil, but it is farther on, in the older part."
They passed slowly along, under the drooping elms and willows, past
the monuments on either hand--here, resting on a low brick wall, a slab
of marble, once white, now gray and moss-grown, from which the hand
of time had well nigh erased the carved inscription; here a family vault,

built into the side of a mound of earth, from which only the barred iron
door distinguished it; here a pedestal, with a time-worn angel holding a
broken fragment of the resurrection trumpet; here a prostrate headstone,
and there another bending to its fall; and among them a profusion of
rose bushes, on some of which the early roses were already
blooming--scarcely a well-kept cemetery, for in many lots the
shrubbery grew in wild unpruned luxuriance; nor yet entirely neglected,
since others showed the signs of loving care, and an effort had been
made to keep the walks clean and clear.
Father and son had traversed half the width of the cemetery, when they
came to a spacious lot, surrounded by large trees and containing several
monuments. It seemed less neglected than the lots about it, and as they
drew nigh they saw among the tombs a very black and seemingly aged
Negro engaged in pruning a tangled rose tree. Near him stood a
dilapidated basket, partially filled with weeds and leaves, into which he
was throwing the dead and superfluous limbs. He seemed very intent
upon his occupation, and had not noticed the colonel's and Phil's
approach until they had paused at the side of