The snow lay deep, on this night of which I tell you,--a night somewhere
near the first of January in this year. Two old men, a white and a
black, who were rooting about the farm-yard from stable to fodder-rack,
waded through deep drifts of it.

"Tell yer, Mars' Joe," said the negro, banging the stable-door, "dat
hoss ort n't ter risk um's bones dis night. Ef yer go ter de Yankee
meetin', Coly kern't tote yer."

"Well, well, Uncle Bone, that's enough," said old Scofield testily,
looking through the stall-window at the horse, with a face anxious
enough to show that the dangers of foundering for Coly and for the Union
were of about equal importance in his mind.

A heavily built old fellow, big-jointed, dull-eyed, with a short, black
pipe in his mouth, going about peering into sheds and out-houses,--the
same routine he and Bone had gone through every night for thirty
years,--joking, snarling, cursing, alternately. The cramped old routine,
dogged, if you choose to call it so, was enough for him: you could tell
that by a glance at his earnest, stolid face; you could see that it need
not take Prospero's Ariel forty minutes to put a girdle about this man's
world: ten would do it, tie up the farm, and the dead and live
Scofields, and the Democratic party, with an ideal reverence for
"Firginya" under all. As for the Otherwhere, outside of Virginia, he
heeded it as much as a Hindoo does the turtle on which the earth rests.
For which you shall not sneer at Joe Scofield, or the Pagan. How wide is
your own "sacred soil"?--the creed, government, bit of truth, other
human heart, self, perhaps, to which your soul roots itself
vitally,--like a cuttle-fish sucking to an inch of rock,--and drifts out