standing out here in the woods then."

"There is no danger here now, is there?" said I.

"No, no, not now." But as he drove along he turned to say that _he_
wasn't afraid of _any_ thing; he wasn't that kind of a man. Then, with a
final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, "A man's life is always
in danger."

After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my
unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, and
so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot my
manners till it was too late. One thing I learned: that it is not
prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man's blood, in either sense
of the word, by his dress or occupation. This man had brought seven or
eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-five
cents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a load
afterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothing
had on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of
holes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ---- and
had "owned niggers."

A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was a
boy of perhaps ten or eleven. He rode his horse, and was barefooted and
barelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heel
was fastened an enormous spur. Who was it that infected the world with
the foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two different
things? And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boy
was the true philosopher?