Nicholas rolled over again and faced the outstretched wings of the
noseless angel on the nearest tombstone. The loss of the nose had
distorted the marble smile into a grimace, which gave a leer to the
remaining features. As the boy looked at it he laughed suddenly, and his
voice startled him amid the droning of bees. Then he sat up and glanced
at his brier-scratched feet stretched upon the slab, and laughed again
for the sheer joy of discord.




III


Nicholas followed the main street to its sudden end at King's College,
and turned into one of the diverging ways which skirted the whitewashed
plank fence of the college grounds, and led to what was known in the
neighbourhood as the Old Stage Road. Passing a straggling group of negro
cabins, it stretched, naked, bleached, and barren, for a good half-mile,
dividing with its sandy length the low-lying fields, which were sown on
the one side in a sparse crop of grain and on the other in the rich
leaves and round pink heads of ripening clover. At the end of the
half-mile the road ascended a slight elevation, and the character of the
soil changed abruptly into clay of vivid red, which, extending a dozen
yards up the rain-washed hillside, appeared, in a general view of the
landscape, like the scarlet tongue protruding from the silvery body of a
serpent.

Far ahead to the right of the highway and beyond the thinly sown wheat a
stretch of pine woodland was darkly limned against the western horizon,