thoughtfully to prepare for bed.




CHAPTER VII

THE RETURN OF MONSIEUR JEAN HUGON


To the north the glebe was bounded by a thick wood, a rank and dense
"second growth" springing from earth where had once stood, decorously
apart, the monster trees of the primeval forest; a wild maze of young
trees, saplings and underbrush, overrun from the tops of the slender,
bending pines to the bushes of dogwood and sassafras, and the rotting,
ancient stumps and fallen logs, by the uncontrollable, all-spreading vine.
It was such a fantastic thicket as one might look to find in fairyland,
thorny and impenetrable: here as tall as a ten years' pine, there sunken
away to the height of the wild honeysuckles; everywhere backed by blue
sky, heavy with odors, filled, with the flash of wings and the songs of
birds. To the east the thicket fell away to low and marshy grounds, where
tall cypresses grew, and myriads of myrtle bushes. Later in the year women
and children would venture in upon the unstable earth for the sake of the
myrtle berries and their yield of fragrant wax, and once and again an
outlying slave had been tracked by men and dogs to the dark recesses of
the place; but for the most part it was given over to its immemorial
silence. To the south and the west the tobacco fields of Fair View closed
in upon the glebe, taking the fertile river bank, and pressing down to the
crooked, slow-moving, deeply shadowed creek, upon whose farther bank
stood the house of the Rev. Gideon Darden.