The rains had come.  The dark slate-tinted clouds hung low over the station, but every log house, freshly dight with whitewash of the marly clay, after the Indian method, still shone in the shadow as if the sun were upon it.  The turf was green, despite the passing of many feet, and where a slight depression held water, a few ducks, Carolina bred, were quacking and paddling about; now and then these were counted with great interest, for they had a trick of taking to the woods with others of their kind, and relapsing to savagery,—­truly distressing to the domestic poultry prospects of the station.  The doors of the Mivane cabin were all ajar,—­the one at the rear opening into a shed-room, unfloored, which gave a vista into more sheds, merely roofed spaces, inclosed at either end.  A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house, fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat, giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman, neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and appropriated the knotty points of the discourse.

In the outer shed, Caesar, clad like the Indians and the pioneers in buckskin, was mending the plough-gear, and talking with great loquacity to another negro, of the type known then and later as “the new nigger,” the target of the plantation jokes, because of his “greenness,” being of a fresh importation.  He possibly remembered much of Africa, but he accepted without demur and with admiring and submissive meekness stories of the great sights that Caesar protested he had seen there,—­Vauxhall Gardens and Temple Bar (which last Caesar thought in his simplicity was a bar for the refreshment of the inner man) and a certain resort indisputably for that purpose called White’s Chocolate House,—­all represented as pleasantly and salubriously situated in the interior of Guinea.  But after all, if a story is well told, why carp at slight anachorisms?

Richard Mivane’s attention had been diverted from the thread of his own reminiscences by the fact that the little flax-wheel of Peninnah Penelope Anne had ceased to whirl, and the low musical monody of its whir that was wont to bear a pleasant accompaniment to the burden of his thoughts was suddenly silent.  He lifted his eyes and saw that she was gazing dreamily into the flare of the great fire, the spinning-wheel still, the end of the thread motionless in her hand.  The burnished waves of her golden brown hair were pushed a bit awry, and her face was so wan and thoughtful that even her dress of crimson wool did not lessen its pallor.  The voices of the three children on the floor grated on the old man’s mood as they were busied in defending a settler’s fort, insecurely constructed of stones and sticks, and altogether roofless, garrisoned by a number of pebbles, while a poke full of wily Indian kernels of corn swarmed to the attack.