Sometimes I glanced at the newspaper; sometimes I looked out at the pleasant Southern garden, where the fountain flashed and fell among weeping willows, and laurels, orange-trees, and myrtles.

“Hullo!” I cried suddenly, disturbing Moore’s Aztec researches, “here is a queer affair in the usually quiet town of Clayville.  Listen to this;” and I read aloud the following “par,” as I believe paragraphs are styled in newspaper offices:—­

“’Instinct and Accident.—­As Colonel Randolph was driving through our town yesterday and was passing Captain Jones’s sample-room, where the colonel lately shot Moses Widlake in the street, the horses took alarm and started violently downhill.  The colonel kept his seat till rounding the corner by the Clayville Bank, when his wheels came into collision with that edifice, and our gallant townsman was violently shot out.  He is now lying in a very precarious condition.  This may relieve Tom Widlake of the duty of shooting the colonel in revenge for his father.  It is commonly believed that Colonel Randolph’s horses were maddened by the smell of the blood which has dried up where old Widlake was shot.  Much sympathy is felt for the colonel.  Neither of the horses was injured.’”

“Clayville appears to be a lively kind of place,” I said.  “Do you often have shootings down here?”

“We do,” said Moore, rather gravely; “it is one of our institutions with which I could dispense.”

“And do you ‘carry iron,’ as the Greeks used to say, or ‘go heeled,’ as your citizens express it?”

“No, I don’t; neither pistol nor knife.  If any one shoots me, he shoots an unarmed man.  The local bullies know it, and they have some scruple about shooting in that case.  Besides, they know I am an awkward customer at close quarters.”

Moore relapsed into his Mexican historian, and I into the newspaper.

“Here is a chance of seeing one of your institutions at last,” I said.

I had found an advertisement concerning a lot of negroes to be sold that very day by public auction in Clayville.  All this, of course, was “before the war.”

“Well, I suppose you ought to see it,” said Moore, rather reluctantly.  He was gradually emancipating his own servants, as I knew, and was even suspected of being a director of “the Underground Railroad” to Canada.

“Peter,” he cried, “will you be good enough to saddle three horses and bring them round?”

Peter, a “darkey boy” who had been hanging about in the garden, grinned and went off.  He was a queer fellow, Peter, a plantation humourist, well taught in all the then unpublished lore of “Uncle Remus.”  Peter had a way of his own, too, with animals, and often aided Moore in collecting objects of natural history.

“Did you get me those hornets, Peter?” said Moore, when the black returned with the horses.

“Got ’em safe, massa, in a little box,” replied Peter, who then mounted and followed at a respectful distance as our squire.