The old custodian stood smiling, familiar, respectful, disappointed.  “Some of ’em my people, too, Mas’ John,” he cannily observed.

I put a little silver in his hand.  “Didn’t I see a box somewhere,” I said, “with something on it about the restoration of the church?”

“Something on it, but nothing in it!” exclaimed Mayrant; at which moderate pleasantry the custodian broke into extreme African merriment and ambled away.  “You needn’t have done it,” protested the Southerner, and I naturally claimed my stranger’s right to pay my respects in this manner.  Such was our introduction, agreeable and unusual.

A silence then unexpectedly ensued and the formality fell colder than ever upon us.  The custodian’s departure had left us alone, looking at each other across all the unexpressed knowledge that each knew the other had.  Mayrant had come impulsively back to me from his aunts, without stopping to think that we had never yet exchanged a word; both of us were now brought up short, and it was the cake that was speaking volubly in our self-conscious dumbness.  It was only after this brief, deep gap of things unsaid that John Mayrant came to the surface again, and began a conversation of which, on both our parts, the first few steps were taken on the tiptoes of an archaic politeness; we trod convention like a polished French floor; you might have expected us, after such deliberate and graceful preliminaries, to dance a verbal minuet.

We, however, danced something quite different, and that conversation lasted during many days, and led us, like a road, up hill and down dale to a perfect acquaintance.  No, not perfect, but delightful; to the end he never spoke to me of the matter most near him, and I but honor him the more for his reticence.

Of course his first remark had to be about Kings Port and me; had he understood rightly that this was my first visit?

My answer was equally traditional.

It was, next, correct that he should allude to the weather; and his reference was one of the two or three that it seems a stranger’s destiny always to hear in a place new to him:  he apologized for the weather—­so cold a season had not, in his memory, been experienced in Kings Port; it was to the highest point exceptional.

I exclaimed that it had been, to my Northern notions, delightfully mild for March.  “Indeed,” I continued, “I have always said that if March could be cut out of our Northern climate, as the core is cut out of an apple, I should be quite satisfied with eleven months, instead of twelve.  I think it might prolong one’s youth.”

The fire of that season lighted in his eyes, but he still stepped upon polished convention.  He assured me that the Southern September hurricane was more deplorable than any Northern March could be.  “Our zone should be called the Intemperate zone,” said he.

“But never in Kings Port,” I protested; “with your roses out-of-doors—­ and your ladies indoors!”