The question, happily, was one of no great consequence.  If the Prince had never lived in the house, the Princess had; and she, by all accounts (and I make certain her husband would have said the same), was the worthier person of the two.  And even if neither of them had lived there, if my sentiment had been all wasted (but there was no question of tears), the place itself was sightly, the house was old, and the way thither a pleasant one—­first down the hill in a zigzag course to the vicinity of the railway station, then by a winding country road through the valley past a few negro cabins, and up the slope on the farther side.  Prince Murat, or no Prince Murat, I should love to travel that road to-day, instead of sitting before a Massachusetts fire, with the ground deep under snow, and the air full of thirty or forty degrees of frost.

In the front yard of one of the cabins opposite the car-wheel foundry, and near the station, as I now remember, a middle-aged negress was cutting up an oak log.  She swung the axe with vigor and precision, and the chips flew; but I could not help saying, “You ought to make the man do that.”

She answered on the instant.  “I would,” she said, “if I had a man to make.”

“I’m sure you would,” I thought.  Her tongue was as sharp as her axe.

Ought I to have ventured a word in her behalf, I wonder, when a man of her own color, and a pretty near neighbor, told me with admirable naivete the story of his bereavement and his hopes?  His wife had died a year before, he said, and so far, though he had not let the grass grow under his feet, he had found no one to take her place.  He still meant to do so, if he could.  He was only seventy-four years old, and it was not good for a man to be alone.  He seemed a gentle spirit, and I withheld all mention of the stalwart and manless wood-cutter.  I hope he went farther, and fared better.  So youthful as he was, surely there was no occasion for haste.

When I had skirted a cotton-field—­the crop just out of the ground—­and a bit of wood on the right, and a swamp with a splendid display of white water-lilies on the left, and had begun to ascend the gentle slope, I met a man of considerably more than seventy-four years.

“Can you tell me just where the Murat place is?” I inquired.

He grinned broadly, and thought he could.  He was one of the old Murat servants, as his father had been before him.  “I was borned on to him,” he said, speaking of the Prince.  Murat was “a gentleman, sah.”  That was a statement which it seemed impossible for him to repeat often enough.  He spoke from a slave’s point of view.  Murat was a good master.  The old man had heard him say that he kept servants “for the like of the thing.”  He didn’t abuse them.  He “never was for barbarizing a poor colored person at all.”  Whipping?  Oh, yes.  “He didn’t miss your fault.  No, sah, he didn’t miss your fault.”  But his servants never were “ironed.”  He “didn’t believe in barbarousment.”