After a while the sounds from the public room below, where men were carousing, disturbed his slumber.  He stirred, and awoke refreshed.  It was afternoon, but he felt no hunger, only thirst, which he quenched with the wine at hand.  His windows gave upon the Capitol and a green wood beyond; the waving trees enticed, while the room was dull and the noises of the house distasteful.  He said to himself that he would walk abroad, would go out under the beckoning trees and be rid of the town.  He remembered that the Council was to meet that afternoon.  Well, it might sit without him!  He was for the woods, where dwelt the cool winds and the shadows deep and silent.

A few yards, and he was quit of Duke of Gloucester Street; behind him, porticoed Capitol, gaol, and tiny vineclad debtor’s prison.  In the gaol yard the pirates sat upon a bench in the sunshine, and one smoked a long pipe, and one brooded upon his irons.  Gold rings were in their ears, and their black hair fell from beneath colored handkerchiefs twisted turbanwise around their brows.  The gaoler watched them, standing in his doorway, and his children, at play beneath a tree, built with sticks a mimic scaffold, and hanged thereon a broken puppet.  There was a shady road leading through a wood to Queen’s Creek and the Capitol Landing, and down this road went Haward.  His step was light; the dullness, the throbbing pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and a strange exaltation of spirit.  Fancy was quickened, imagination heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things.  Across his mind flitted fragments of verse,—­now a broken line just hinting beauty, now the pure passion of a lovely stanza.  His thoughts went to and fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them stood his knowledge that presently he was going back to Fair View.  To-morrow, when the Governor’s ball was over, when he could decently get away, he would leave the town; he would go to his house in the country.  Late flowers bloomed in his garden; the terrace was fair above the river; beneath the red brick wall, on the narrow little creek shining like a silver highway, lay a winged boat; and the highway ran past a glebe house; and in the glebe house dwelt a dryad whose tree had closed against her.  Audrey!—­a fair name.  Audrey, Audrey!—­the birds were singing it; out of the deep, Arcadian shadows any moment it might come, clearly cried by satyr, Pan, or shepherd.  Hark! there was song—­

It was but a negro on the road behind, singing to himself as he went about his master’s business.  The voice was the voice of the race, mellow, deep, and plaintive; perhaps the song was of love in a burning land.  He passed the white man, and the arching trees hid him, but the wake of music was long in fading.  The road leading through a cool and shady dell, Haward left it, and took possession of the mossy earth beneath a holly-tree.  Here, lying on the ground, he could see the road through the intervening foliage; else the place had seemed the heart of an ancient wood.