He, too, had business in Richmond, and problems not a few to solve, but
as he was a man who never sacrificed the present to the past, and rarely
to the future, he alone of the three really drank the wine of the
morning air, saw how blue was the sky, and admired the crimson trailers
that the dewberry spread across the road. When his gaze followed the
floating down from a milkweed pod, or marked the scurry of a chipmunk at
a white oak's root, or dwelt upon the fox-grape's swinging curtain, he
would have said, if questioned, that life in the woods and in an Indian
country taught a man the use of his eyes. "Love of Nature" was a phrase
at which he would have looked blank, and a talisman which he did not
know he possessed, and it may be doubted if he could have defined the
word "Romance." He whistled as he rode, and presently, the sun rising
higher and the clear wind blowing with force, he began to sing,--

"From the Walnut Hills to the Silver Lake,
Row, boatmen, row!
Danger in the levee, danger in the brake,
Row, boatmen, row!
Yellow water rising, Indians on the shore!"

Lewis Rand, perched upon the platform before the cask, his feet
dangling, his head thrown back against the wood, and his eyes upon the
floating clouds, pursued inwardly and with a swelling heart the
oft-broken, oft-renewed argument with his father. "I do not want to go
to the fields. I want to go to school. Every chance I've had, I've
learned, and I want to learn more and more. I do not want to be like
you, nor your father, nor his father, and I do not want to be like Adam
Gaudylock. I want to be like my mother's folk. You've no right to keep
me planting and suckering and cutting and firing and planting again, as
though I were a negro! Negroes don't care, but I care! I'm not your