"This is the Black Sea," he said, pointing to the dull cabins that
crouched here and there upon the earth, with the dark twinkling of their
black folk darting out to see the strangers ride by.

Despite herself Miss Taylor caught the allegory and half whispered, "Lo!
the King himself!" as a black man almost rose from the tangled earth at
their side. He was tall and thin and sombre-hued, with a carven face and
thick gray hair.

"Your servant, mistress," he said, with a sweeping bow as he strode
toward the swamp. Miss Taylor stopped him, for he looked interesting,
and might answer some of her brother's questions. He turned back and
stood regarding her with sorrowful eyes and ugly mouth.

"Do you live about here?" she asked.

"I'se lived here a hundred years," he answered. She did not believe it;
he might be seventy, eighty, or even ninety--indeed, there was about him
that indefinable sense of age--some shadow of endless living; but a
hundred seemed absurd.

"You know the people pretty well, then?"

"I knows dem all. I knows most of 'em better dan dey knows demselves. I
knows a heap of tings in dis world and in de next."

"This is a great cotton country?"

"Dey don't raise no cotton now to what dey used to when old Gen'rel
Cresswell fust come from Carolina; den it was a bale and a half to the