HERE was a big field near his old home where he and the other boys, black and white, had played "round cat" and "chermany" in the summers before the war and had set their rabbit-traps in seasons of frost and snow. It lay near the edge of a wood, which was now cool and umbrageous with midsummer leafiness. The wood had furnished a fine restingplace for the boys when their games were ended; and its giant trees and dense undergrowth had been imagined fortresses and robbers' dens in those days. Beyond the wood lay the Dragon Swamp, with its dark and unexplored recesses and jungles of intertwisted vines. It was a place of shuddering stories about runaway negroes and "patter-rollers" and murders and unsolved mysteries.

On the side of the field nearest the great house once stood a row of negro cabins, built of unshaped logs, whose interstices were chinked with mud and whose stick chimneys were "daubed" with the same material. They were snug and comfortable enough in winter and cool, with open door and unglazed window, in the summer-time, when the little slab-paled gardens in front smiled amid bowers of great nodding sunflowers and overflowed with succulent vegetables.

His earliest memories of the "quarters" were interwoven and embroidered with the kindly affections of their dusky deni

zens.

There were no ginger cakes quite so good as those which he had eaten on the rough benches at their doors. No later watermelons ever had "meat" so red and ripe as theirs. No "pulled" molasses candy was so sweet. And the cold fried chicken legs and biscuits were unforget able.

When he came back he found the field overgrown with sassafras bush and riotous vines and tangled briers. The cabins

had tumbled down and were deserted. Where the sunflowers had once lifted their gorgeous disks above the snaps and collards flourished a pestilent growth of jimson-weeds unconfined by any slab-palings. Broom-sedge possessed what had been a buckwheat patch near Uncle Orrin's cabin at the end of the row. He remembered the bees in the buckwheat blossoms and their hives under the scraggy peach-tree, and how he had watched them on lucent summer mornings long ago. The "bee-gums" had vanished; and Orrin's cabin, like the others, was a wreck. Orrin himself, on whose knees he had sat when a little chap and listened to wonderful tales of the "varmints" and the "creeturs," had long since become only one of the memories of his boyhood.

He traversed the brier-grown and almost invisible pathway, once so familiar, that led from the quarters to the mansionhouse, and walked past the stables where the horses had been kept. Their stalls were empty and the weather-boarding was ripped off in places. The corn-crib door hung open on a broken hinge.

His father had fallen in the Seven Days' Battles and his mother had soon followed. Thoughts of them impelled him in the direction of the brick-walled graveyard beyond the house from which the marble tombstones were visible above its green carpet of periwinkle vines. As he approached the mansion, in which five generations of his people had lived their quiet and uneventful lives, a sense of the futilities of existence overwhelmed him. He paused and looked beyond the broken hedge, and saw the gravestones grim and silent under the summer sun.

There was no one in the house to bid him welcome, no sign of life or movement about the place. The front door gaped open and the porch, where clambering tea-roses had filled the air of long ago with fragrance, was dropping down. The

windows stared, shutterless, from broken sash and pane upon the desolate lawn which once lay beneath them in smooth, luxuriant greenness.

The lilac bushes had disappeared; but some broken mimosa-trees, still crowned with delicate and lace-like foliage, remained. The leaves were yellowing, as though they lamented the departure of the pink and feathery blossoms with which the earlier summer had adorned them. The inevitable and vandal sassafras had usurped the places of the old japonicas and "sweet-smelling shrubs," and had taken brigand possession of the broad carriageway over which the great, curved-spring family carriage had rolled behind the bay horses, with Uncle Cupid on the boot, on Sundays, to take his father and mother to Christ Church.

Over the whole place hung the pall of poignant and inexpressible change. The past was engulfed in the desolation that had been wrought into everything within his vision. The illusions of his earlier life had vanished.

He could not find it in his heart to enter the old gray house now haunted by disappointments and sorrow. He stood and gazed at it.

A rabbit came hopping out of an undergrowth of briers in a corner of the yard and ran through the sassafras bushes near him.

He turned and strode away under the smiling August morning.

As he walked along the sandy river road toward the county court-house his mind was full of memories of the great struggle. They submerged his semiconscious recognition of the once familiar landmarks. He thought of the April morning in '61 when, with the confidence of youth, he had ridden with his father along this road in the direction in which he was now travelling.

"Lincoln has made the call for seventyfive thousand troops," he had said, "and the State has seceded. There are one hundred and fifty men in our company, and we shall be in Richmond in three days." "It is a sad time for all of us, my boy," his father had responded, "but saddest for us older folk who have loved the Union so long. My prayer has been that God would preserve it."

"They are coming to invade the State, sir," he had said. "We should be false to our forefathers and to ourselves if we did not defend it."

His heart had been hot, and the vision of approaching war had kindled the fires of anticipated glory and adventure. Three weeks before he had been elected a lieutenant of the company.

More than four years had intervened between that April morning and this time of his home-coming-years of struggle, of hardship, of self-abnegation, and of conflict all in vain. The confidence that had known no misgivings was shattered. The end had come. Many of the lads with whom he had played in the old field as boys and marched to Richmond as soldiers were dead in battle; and the flag under which he and they had fought was furled in defeat forever.

After Appomattox he had gone South with many of his comrades in arms to join Johnston at Charlotte; and later he had ridden farther on with a few of them, in the vague hope of attaining a new Confederacy beyond the Mississippi. Now that it was all over he had come back home, ragged, penniless, bereft, unparoled. It was August, 1865, and he had never surrendered.

He entered the little village and walked along the grass-grown country road that was its main street until he reached the one-storied brick court-house, covered by Virginia creeper, that had stood there for more than a hundred years in its grove of ancient oak-trees. On either side were the modest houses of the villagers, weather-beaten and unpainted with their tiny green-palinged yards in front and their vegetable gardens at the back. They seemed very poor and forlorn as he regarded them and small with the littleness that physical objects often present to those who have gone away and return. In the stretch of open land between the court-house and the river his company had drilled before they went to Richmond; and he imagined now that he could see the phantom squads marching there. and could hear the voice of the captain giving his sharp commands, and the roll of the drum.

Looking up from where the gate to the court-house yard had once been, he saw a

flag drooping above the low building. It did not occur to him that it was the banner which his father had followed at Monterey and Buena Vista. It only symbolized now the wreck of a great hope.

His impulse, upon seeing it hanging there in the unruffled summer sunshine, was to turn and go away-anywhere, that he might escape the memories which the vision of it awoke.

But he would first inquire of the clerk if any of the boys had come back-John Dillon and Henry Williams and Tommy Taylor, the little lame lad, who could not run with the others but who loved to fetch the ball when it went beyond bounds. He wanted to know about them all.

A young negro man sat on the stone steps in the shadows cast by the immemorial oaks.

"Who you lookin' fur?" the negro asked as he approached.

"How are you, Silas?" he said, recognizing the speaker. "I want to see Mr.

Henderson."

His impulse had been to resent the demeanor of his father's ex-slave, but he kept his temper.

"Dey ain't no clerk in dar now," the man responded, ignoring his salutation. "Dis here is de Freedom's Bureau. De Freedom's Bureau is done turn out Mr. Henderson. Dat whar Cunnel Chisholm o' de Union army stay now."

"Will you move and let me go in ?" he said.

The black man arose leisurely and stood aside.

"Dey gwi' give us de white folks' lan"," he remarked, eying the visitor's worn gray uniform. "Evvy cullud man gwi' git his forty acres an' a mule."

As he paused in the doorway of the clerk's office he saw two Federal soldiers writing at the tables where Mr. Henderson and his deputy, George Collins, had once sat and written in the midst of the record-books on the shelves, some of which went back to the seventeenth century. Three or four negro men stood idly about the room.

He turned on his heel and went out upon the court green. The man at the steps chuckled as he passed.

He met Judge Holmes near the brokendown gate. He had been his father's

friend and greeted him with a warm hand-clasp.

"I'm glad to see you back at last, Jim," said Judge Holmes. "Delighted to see you back. We had put you down among the dead or the missing.'

"I asked for no furlough during the war, judge," he replied. "And I did not hurry home."

Then he questioned the judge, as one wise and prescient, about the present and the future.

"There are few left except the old folks," said Judge Holmes. "There have been great changes; and now we have a harder fate to face than fighting." He listened with grave attention.

"The State is under military rule," continued the judge, “and it is likely to remain so indefinitely. If civil government is ever restored, our former slaves will become our political masters. The whites will be disfranchised. Our farms and plantations have been desolated. There is no stock, no seed, no labor, no anything."

"What else?" queried the home-comer as the judge paused.

"Possibly, land-confiscation. Certainly, a carnival of plunder and oppression, marshalled by rapacity and vice. All the signs are around us. It is a horrible outlook, Jim."

Then he asked the judge about his old playmates and companions, calling their names as the orderly sergeant had called them from the muster-roll on the drillground by the river.

Some had been killed in action, some had died in hospital, some had returned maimed in body or broken in health, some had never come back.

A few were in the country. John Dillon was living down on the Dragon Swamp upon his mother's plantation. Judge Holmes could not imagine how in the world John was to ever make a living there for his mother and the girls.

"They have got nothing but the place, and John left his leg at the Wilderness. Maybe they'll take the land from him." "And Henry Williams?"

"I hear that Henry is up near Kingsmill, but I haven't seen him."

Good-by, judge," said Jim, holding out his hand.

"Why, where are you going?" queried the judge.

"I don't know. Anywhere," he answered. "England, France, Egypt-anywhere. I have got to go away. Some of them were talking about Brazil and some about Mexico."

"I hope you'll stay, Jim," said the judge.

What for?" he asked abruptly; and there was no reply.

He passed into the grass-grown street, and the judge saw him vanish from sight at the bend of the road by the river.

Fifty-one years later an automobile sped down the river road and in it sat a man who, in spite of his white hair and the lines in his rugged face, was erect and soldier-like as youth itself. His unusual appearance had attracted the attention of those who had seen him step alertly from the steamboat at the river wharf.

An octogenarian negro, leaning over the wharf's edge to take a bucket of fish from a young darky in a bug-eye, exclaimed at sight of him:

"Fo' Gord, ef dat ain't de spit 'n' image uv ole Mr. Fent'ess when carriage company uv useter come ter de gre't house 'way back yonder befo' de war!'

The stranger's black broadcloth coat was long-skirted and his waistcoat showed a broad expanse of shirt-front above which a large silk stock illustrated the fashion of the earlier part of the previous century. His trousers were loose and baggy and the white hair which hung below his coat collar was crowned by a broad-brimmed black felt hat.

The vehicle stopped at the gate in front of the little red-brick court-house and the stranger's eyes sought its gabled roof.

"They have taken it down," he said; and the chauffeur wondered what he was talking about.

He emerged from the car and, walking with direct and military step along the worn pathway under the oak-trees, entered the building.

Two or three children in pinafores stared wonderingly at him and a bird sang from a wild-plum thicket near the fence.

In the little office, amid the shelves of record-books and time-stained bundles of

papers, he found an unknown man, gray and rugged-faced like himself, writing at the table where the Federal officer had sat half a century before. The left sleeve of the writer was empty and pinned to his coat at the shoulder.

He gave the stranger courteous greeting and invited him to be seated.

"I am the clerk," he said. "I'll see you in a few minutes."

Then the one-armed clerk turned to an aged countryman, bent and withered, who leaned upon a cane where he stood near the writing-table. On the table lay a large printed sheet of paper with blank spaces, which the occupant of the office had been filling in with pen and ink.

"Why didn't you apply before this?" he queried of the withered countryman as he wrote.

"It's been fifty-odd years now," the answer. "I've been away from the county most o' the time and I didn't need it. Now I do. I came back some six months ago and they told me I could get it. Mr. Dillon is here at the court-house to-day from down by the Dragon Swamp. He knows when I went into it. I can get him for my witness."

"Well," said the clerk, "it's all right so far. Let's finish it."

He picked up the sheet and glanced over it, reading aloud the printed headings.

"Name? Um-huh! Age? Residence at time of enlistment? Yes. Let's see? Um-huh! Company? Regiment? Division? Date of enlistment? Yes, we've got all that down. Battles in which engaged? Yes. We were on that. Did you say Antietam, also?"

"I said Sharpsburg," was the reply. "That's what we called it. It was over in Maryland, on Antietam Creek."

"Where did you surrender?" asked the clerk.

"I didn't surrender," said the other. "When the government left Richmond, April 2d, '65, I knew that the jig was up. I quit and went home."

"You did what?" exclaimed the onearmed clerk, pushing his chair back from the table.

"I quit. The war was over."

The clerk arose and confronted the applicant.