After leaving this house our road lay through a cotton field for a short distance, and then we entered a strip of woods, through which ran the little stream beside which I had observed the clay.  We stopped at the creek, the road by which we had come crossing it and continuing over the land of my neighbor, Colonel Pemberton.  By the roadside, on my own land, a bank of clay rose in almost a sheer perpendicular for about ten feet, evidently extending back some distance into the low, pine-clad hill behind it, and having also frontage upon the creek.  There were marks of bare feet on the ground along the base of the bank, and the face of it seemed freshly disturbed and scored with finger marks, as though children had been playing there.

“Do you think that clay would make good brick, Julius?” I asked the old man, who had been unusually quiet during the drive.  He generally played with the whip, making little feints at the mare, or slapping her lightly with the reins, or admonishing her in a familiar way; but on this occasion the heat or some other cause had rendered him less demonstrative than usual.

“Yas, suh, I knows it would,” he answered.

“How do you know?  Has it ever been used for that purpose?”

“No, suh; but I got my reasons fer sayin’ so.  Ole Mars Dugal useter hab a brickya’d fu’ther up de branch—­I dunno as yer noticed it, fer it’s all growed ober wid weeds an’ grass.  Mars Dugal said dis yer clay wouldn’ make good brick, but I knowed better.”

I judged from the appearance of the clay that it was probably deficient in iron.  It was of a yellowish-white tint and had a sort of greasy look.

“Well,” I said, “we’ll drive up to the other place and get a sample of that clay, and then we’ll come back this way.”

“Hold on a minute, dear,” said my wife, looking at her watch, “Mabel has been over to Colonel Pemberton’s all the afternoon.  She said she’d be back at five.  If we wait here a little while she’ll be along and we can take her with us.”

“All right,” I said, “we’ll wait for her.  Drive up a little farther, Julius, by that jessamine vine.”

While we were waiting, a white woman wearing a homespun dress and slat-bonnet, came down the road from the other side of the creek, and lifting her skirts slightly, waded with bare feet across the shallow stream.  Reaching the clay-bank she stooped and gathered from it, with the aid of a convenient stick, a quantity of the clay which she pressed together in the form of a ball.  She had not seen us at first, the bushes partially screening us; but when, having secured the clay, she turned her face in our direction and caught sight of us watching her, she hid the lump of clay in her pocket with a shamefaced look, and hurried away by the road she had come.

“What is she going to do with that, Uncle Julius?” asked my wife.  We were Northern settlers, and still new to some of the customs of the locality, concerning which we often looked to Julius for information.  He had lived on the place many years and knew the neighborhood thoroughly.