to the red cow."

While she spoke Delily entered with a plate of cornbread and a pot of
coffee, and a minute later Reuben Merryweather paused on the threshold
to shake off a sprinkling of bran from his hair and beard. He was a
bent, mild looking old man, with a wooden leg which made a stumping
noise when he walked, and a pair of wistful brown eyes, like those of an
aged hound that has been worn out by hard service. Past seventy now,
his youth had been trained to a different civilization, and there was
a touching gentleness in his face, as if he expressed still the mental
attitude of a class which had existed merely as a support or a foil to
the order above it. Without spirit to resent, he, with his fellows, had
endured the greatest evils of slavery. With the curse of free labour
on the land, there had been no incentive for toil, no hire for the
labourer. Like an incubus the system had lain over them, stifling
all energy, checking all progress, retarding all prosperity save the
prosperity of the great land-owners. Then the soil had changed hands,
and where the plough had broken the earth, the seeds of a democracy had
germinated and put forth from the very blood of the battlefields. In the
upward pressure of class, he had seen the stability of custom yield at
last to the impetus of an energy that was not racial but individual. Yet
from the transition he had remained always a little apart. Reverence had
become for him a habit of mind, and he had learned that respect could
outlive even a belief in the thing upon which it was founded. Mr.
Jonathan and he had been soldiers together. His old commander still
entered his thoughts to the rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon,
and a single sublime action at Malvern Hill had served in the mind of
the soldier to spread a legendary glamour over a life which held hardly
another incident that was worthy of remembrance.