purely honorary one. A captain, Dab, the fire-eating captain, was however, he must certainly had harmlessly removed in the second been. A very different sort of a year of the war. The climax came one, too, from Captain Topfodder, about in this wise. It was in one who kept the store at Digges's Mills, of the great battles of that year, I and took his rank from a freight forget which, that the 20th Virbarge he had skilfully navigated ginia Cavalry were ordered to for many years on the James River charge a regiment of Massachusetts Canal. That the Colonel was in infantry. It was a misty day, and any sense a false pretender to it was not till the horsemen were military honours was the very within a couple of hundred yards reverse of truth. Indeed, it was of the enemy that an overwhelmhis valour that may be said to ing body of cavalry was discovered have actually proved in this re- to be drawn up in their rear. At spect his stumbling - block. If any rate the retreat was sounded, valour alone-and of course I and the 20th Virginia wheeled allude to the Civil War-could about. Not so, however, Mar'se have regulated rank, my old friend Dab! That big voice which the should by rights have been a gen- negroes declared would go in two eral of division at the very least. holloas to Shucksville, was heard For it was always said-said, that sounding through the fog and is to say, in Berkeley county smoke that its owner would be that Dab Digges was the bravest dd if he'd retreat. And that soldier in the whole Southern was the last that was seen of army. His valour, however, was Mar'se Dab for two years. of such a hopelessly reckless kind, and his contempt of discipline so profound, that even the command of a regiment would have been out of the question. So as a captain he started in the 20th Virginia Cavalry; and a captain he remained till the second year of the war, when he was taken prisoner. Those of his brother officers who survived the struggle used to say it was extraordinary that Cousin Dab (for the regiment was raised in Berke ley, and most of the officers were his relations) succeeded in escaping death or captivity, or even a wound, so long. "There was no man in the war," they said, "that tried so hard to get killed as Cousin Dab, and that wrought such havoc in the ranks of the enemy; or," they sometimes added in the strictest confidence, "got his men so often into 'tight places.' I gathered that it was upon the whole considered by no means an irreparable calamity when Mar'se From evidence that filtered out afterwards, it appeared that the Yankee infantry were amazed upon that day to receive the charge of a solitary horseman, who came down upon them out of the fog, from whence they never rightly knew. They supposed it to be a runaway horse till it got so close they could see that the rider was spurring for all he was worth and shouting like a madman, as they then took him to be. Not a rifle was raised, but when Mar'se Dab arrived among the enemy's ranks, so far from appreciating the forbearance, he laid about him with such zest that if his sword had had an edge on it, several people would have been badly hurt. As it was, he was knocked off his horse with the butt-end of a musket, and sent to the Federal prison on Lake Erie. Here Mar'se Dab chafed for nearly two years, picking up various and useful accomplishments, hard prepared to swear his patient upon that occasion would have reached the local metropolis in one. When I first knew the Colonel he had just come to live at Clover Hill. This was not actually at the close of the war, but it was at the close of that three or four years of chaos-political, social, and financial--which ensued in war-worn Virginia after the surrender of Lee and the abolition of slavery; the period which marked the first conflict of new conditions with old ideas-that reluctant struggle of an old civilisation, based on a kindly picturesque domestic slavery, to adapt itself to an altered state of affairs; a change from the obligation for food, clothing, lodging, and protection, to a business compact between master and servant, terminable at any moment. ly worthy, perhaps, of a Digges. Among these he learnt how to bake bread, to cut hair, and to pull teeth-studies forced upon him partly by the ennui of his position, and partly by the necessities for making a little money out of his fellow-prisoners, with which to procure those cakes of chewing-tobacco which were the solace of his life. Again and again, in the piping times of peace, has Mar'se Dab joked to me of these accomplishments. Two of them at any rate he carried with him into private life, and practised (in a friendly way of course) during his few spare moments, with an enthusiasm that I am afraid somewhat victimised his neighbours. As for hair-cutting, it was at least a harmless if a somewhat singular hobby. The Colonel was indeed in great request in the neigh- Clover Hill was an average Virbourhood as a trimmer of locks. ginia homestead of the better class. As a puller of teeth, Mar'se Dab's It had no pretension, of course, to popularity was nothing like so compare to "Newtown," the old great. He used an old-fashioned Digges place at the other end of the key, and for the rest trusted only county, where the Colonel's eldest to his herculean strength; so the brother still lived at that time. hesitating attitude of the neigh- There, indeed, at Newtown were bourhood towards him on the tooth bric-a-brac, and old sideboards, question may be partially under- and antediluvian bedsteads, and a stood. There were some people of good deal of old silver and family an economical turn of mind who portraits that, whatever their dewere tempted to call in once the fects may have been as works of gratuitous services of the Colonel. art, represented at any rate ladies But I never heard that the most and gentlemen. Newtown was desperate sufferer from toothache quite a famous place in Virginia; or the most penurious individual but Clover Hill was nothing of ever repeated the experiment. the kind. For that reason, perLiving near, as I did, I have heard sounds occasionally proceeding from Clover Hill that the negroes declared was Mar'se Dab at work upon some confiding countryman's jaw. haps, it was all the more typical. The place, till the Colonel took possession, had been occupied only by a better-class overseer. Seedwheat had been stored in the parlour. The best bedchamber had I was only once, however, a been for years devoted to the storwitness to one of these dental age of dried apples and washed operations. If, as the negroes wool, and the walls were coated said, Mar'se Dab "could go to thick with entomological speciShucksville in two hollers," I am mens that had danced in the sunny rays of a half-score of departed summers. With the Digges advent this was of course all changed. But the house was furnished distinctly upon Thacker and not upon Digges lines. As Amanda Digges was an only daughter of old man Hiram Thacker, she had inherited his household goods. Among these, too, there were family portraits of a kind-portraits of individuals, however, that suggested the signpainter s art in execution and the cattle-show in design. Admirable men and women, no doubt, these two generations of Thackers that blew about in gilt frames upon the walls. There were few men in Middle Virginia that knew the exact value of a negro so well as Hiram Thacker. There were none whose "shipping" tobacco brought higher prices in Shucksville than that of his brother Moses. But the portraits, however faithful to nature, were not of a kind to give an aristocratic tone to the family picture-gallery. The house was of red brick; it was two stories high and perfectly square. A wide corridor ran straight through it below, and another with the same direct simplicity pierced it above. Upon the ground-floor there were three rooms upon each side of the corridor, all exactly the same size and exactly alike. Upon the upper floor, too, there were three rooms upon each side of the corridor, also all of the same size and exactly alike. It had never been rightly decided which was the back and which the front of the Clover Hill house, for at either end of the corridor there were big porticoes, supported by the same number of high white fluted columns, and approached by the same number of half-decayed wooden steps. The up-stair corridor led through doors on to the roofs of these porticoes, from whence, under the overarching leaves of aged oaks, could be seen glorious views of woodlands, fields, and distant mountains. It The house at Clover Hill, though was a pity that these imposing not so venerable nor so large nor props and qualifiers of the otherso hallowed by tradition as New- wise astonishing rectangularity of town, had still been built as dis- the house should have had their tinctly a gentleman's residence in classic beauty marred by their apthe early part of the century. The plication to domestic uses. In Colonel's great-uncle, Randolph Uncle Ran's time, you may be Digges, somewhat prominent in sure, no such things would have his day as a Whig politician, had happened; but in the utilitarianbeen its founder and its occupant ism of Thacker tradition it was for a great number of years. The no uncommon thing, after washinstalment of Amanda Thacker and ing-day, to see the family linen her family household gods at Clover hanging in graceful festoons over Hill was an improvement on the the carved railings, and fluttering overseer interregnum. Still it did in the wanton wind. very little, I am afraid, to restore to Clover Hill the aristocratic tone that was said by old people to have marked it when that venerable patriarch "Uncle Ran" used to make its walls echo to post-prandial denunciations of Jefferson, infidels, and Frenchmen. The doors and the windows of the Clover Hill mansion may possibly one day have fitted tolerably, though even in an old Virginia house of the most approved kind such a condition would have been hardly orthodox. Now, however, they had sprung at their lintels, and gaped at their hinges to such an extent that Mar'se Dab used to swear that the house was not merely not weather-proof, "but it warn't hardly dog-proof. As for the winter wind! The hurricanes that blew down these corridors had one advantage, at any rate, for there was nothing about them of the nature or character of a draught. They were real honest broad-volumed gales, which blew not only down the corridors, but under the closed doors and out of the rattling windows with a force that made the Thacker portraits flap against the whitewashed walls till you trembled for the safety of those great works of art. Half a waggon-load of oak-logs might blaze in the huge draughty chimney, but six feet away from the blaze you were practically out of doors, and had to act accordingly. From the early spring to the late fall of the year, however, there were few more charming spots in all Virginia than Clover Hill. Mar'se Dab could then boast with justice that "ther was 'ar stirrin' thar" (for he had dropped hopelessly, I am sorry to say, into the vernacular), "when the heat elsewhere was enough to kill a mule." To nature's charms, however, I fear Mar'se Dab was almost insensible. He was not devoid of sentiment of a kind. Indeed it was partly that, I think, that made him so reactionary. But it was a sentiment that hugged insensibly all time-honoured Virginia rural customs a sentiment that made him cling obstinately to old-fashioned ways, to be happy among big gangs of negroes, to love the very sight of a tobacco-field, to put up almost cheerfully with roads bottomless for mud, with gates that would not swing, with barns through which the rain-storms soaked, with houses though which the winter winds blew. When the Colonel took up his abode at Clover Hill, the land was in very fair condition. The overseer, who had had it in charge so long for the Digges family, had been a skilful and thrifty farmer. Being too old to be drafted for the army, he had remained at home all through the war. The estate had never been too heavily stocked with negroes, and had been seeded largely to grass and clover, the very acme of high farming in the South of those days. When slavery and capital together were swept away by the war, and the conditions of Southern life practically revolutionised, most sensible men recognised that a different system of farming must be pursued. Numbers of the upper class flinched from the prospect, and went into business. Others set to work with good resolutions, and kept them. Many, again, made. the resolutions, but did not keep them. Mar'se Dab, however, when he came to Clover Hill after the war, not only showed no inclination whatever towards agricultural reform, but he did not even make any profession of such intentions. He did even more than this. He openly and emphatically repudiated any such course, and declared that the style of farming that had been good enough for his fathers was good enough for him. He was too old, he said, to start raising clover and grass, when he'd been all his life trying to kill it in the corn rows. So Mar'se Dab "went into terbaccer." He collected double as many free negroes on the place, both renters and hired hands, as there had been slaves before the war, and commenced that enlightened course which finally reduced Clover Hill from tolerable fertility to absolute bar renness. Mar'se Dab, moreover, was more fortunate than many of his neighbours; for when he married, he got with his wife five thousand dollars of hard money, which, in old man Thacker's thrifty hands, had somehow or other survived the general wreck of war. Clover Hill was a picturesque property, undulating enough to give happy variety to the landscape, without too great abruptness for cultivation. The prevailing colour of the soil was red, which gives such a warm look to fallowed hillsides when contrasted with the green of woodlands and growing crops. Of meadow-land there was plenty in former days snug flats of rich alluvial soil between the hills, whose fertility was sufficient to resist, without deterioration, the average treatment of the old Virginia "rip and tear" system, which was saying much. In the overseer's time, and probably in the time, too, of old Uncle Ran, waving timothy grass and rank clover had flourished there and glistened in the heavy dews of the bright June mornings. When I first knew the place the backs of the negroes in hay time used to bend low, and the perspiration pour from their ebony faces as they swished their mowing-blades through the heavy growth. Little tinkling streams, all overgrown with alders and grape-vines, coursed their way down the valleys; and very troublesome they grew in flood times if treated, as Mar'se Dab used to treat them, with contemptuous neglect. At the far end of the place where Buffalo Creek, which bounded it on one side, crossed the highroad to Shucksville, which bounded it on the other, there stood a venerable wooden edifice which, to gether with the hamlet attached, was known as Digges' Mills. Here the corn and wheat of the neighbourhood had been ground ever since there had been any to grind, which was a good long time. From an Old World standpoint, perhaps, it was not very ancient. At any rate it looked it. While the hum and drone of the wheel and the flashing of the waters over its black and sodden timbers, and the spray that sparkled on the mossy rocks beneath, and the rustic bridge of chestnut trunks that crossed the stream, and the huge weeping-willow from which it swung, made a picture that on sunny summer days it was both cool and pleasant to behold. Besides the mill there was a store, where Mar'se Dab had, in his earlier prosperous days, a ready and extensive credit with Captain Topfodder the merchant. In the days of his too evident decline, he had an account even greater still, whose remote settlement agitated greatly the waking hours of that worthy excommodore of canal-boats. Mar'se Dab's wages to his hired hands, and the advances to his tenants, came more and more, as time went on, in the shape of little notes on the torn leaf of a pocket-book, written in pencil, to the long-suffering Captain. There were whole files of these scrubby little remnants stored away in the desk behind the counter, running after this fashion mostly : "To Cap. TOPFODDER.-Please supply Chris' Johnson with goods to amt $1.75, -Y. friend, D. DIGGES." The Captain began to wish he hadn't been quite such a friend to Dabney Digges. As he sat tilted back in his straw-bottomed chair on the store porch, squirting |