pleasant hour.  In the midst of it there came along a man in a cart, with a load of wood.  We exchanged the time of day, and I remarked upon the smallness of his load.  Yes, he said; but it was a pretty heavy load to drag seven or eight miles over such roads.  Possibly he understood me as implying that he seemed to be in rather small business, although I had no such purpose, for he went on to say:  “In 1861, when this beautiful war broke out between our countries, my father owned niggers.  We didn’t have to do this.  But I don’t complain.  If I hadn’t got a bullet in me, I should do pretty well.”

“Then you were in the war?” I said.

“Oh, yes, yes, sir!  I was in the Confederate service.  Yes, sir, I’m a Southerner to the backbone.  My grandfather was a ——­” (I missed the patronymic), “and commanded St. Augustine.”

The name had a foreign sound, and the man’s complexion was swarthy, and in all simplicity I asked if he was a Minorcan.  I might as well have touched a lighted match to powder.  His eyes flashed, and he came round the tail of the cart, gesticulating with his stick.

“Minorcan!” he broke out.  “Spain and the island of Minorca are two places, ain’t they?” I admitted meekly that they were.

“You are English, ain’t you?” he went on.  “You are English,—­Yankee born,—­ain’t you?”

I owned it.

“Well, I’m Spanish.  That ain’t Minorcan.  My grandfather was a ——­, and commanded St. Augustine.  He couldn’t have done that if he had been Minorcan.”

By this time he was quieting down a bit.  His father remembered the Indian war.  The son had heard him tell about it.

“Those were dangerous times,” he remarked.  “You couldn’t have been standing out here in the woods then.”

“There is no danger here now, is there?” said I.

“No, no, not now.”  But as he drove along he turned to say that he wasn’t afraid of any thing; he wasn’t that kind of a man.  Then, with a final turn, he added, what I could not dispute, “A man’s life is always in danger.”

After he was gone, I regretted that I had offered no apology for my unintentionally offensive question; but I was so taken by surprise, and so much interested in the man as a specimen, that I quite forgot my manners till it was too late.  One thing I learned:  that it is not prudent, in these days, to judge a Southern man’s blood, in either sense of the word, by his dress or occupation.  This man had brought seven or eight miles a load of wood that might possibly be worth seventy-five cents (I questioned the owner of what looked like just such a load afterward, and found his asking price half a dollar), and for clothing had on a pair of trousers and a blue cotton shirt, the latter full of holes, through which the skin was visible; yet his father was a ——­ and had “owned niggers.”

A still more picturesque figure in this procession of wood-carters was a boy of perhaps ten or eleven.  He rode his horse, and was barefooted and barelegged; but he had a cigarette in his mouth, and to each brown heel was fastened an enormous spur.  Who was it that infected the world with the foolish and disastrous notion that work and play are two different things?  And was it Emerson, or some other wise man, who said that a boy was the true philosopher?