of lingering sunny days whose hours are longer than in other places; of the soft speech, the serene and kindly ways of the people; of the royal welcome waiting for him as for every one, heartfelt and heart-warming; he knew it all from a daughter of Kentucky—­his mother.  It was May now, and he remembered she had told him that the land was filled with roses at the end of May—­he would go then.  He owned the old place, Fairfield, and he had never seen it.  Perhaps it had fallen to pieces; perhaps his mother had painted it in colors too bright; but it was his, the bit of the earth that belonged to him.  The Anglo-Saxon joy of land-owning stirred for the first time within him—­he would go to his own place.  Buoyant with the new thought he sat down and wrote a letter.  A cousin of the family, of a younger branch, a certain John Fairfield, lived yet upon the land.  Not in the great house, for that had been closed many years, but in a small house almost as old, called Westerly.  Philip had corresponded with him once or twice about affairs of the estate, and each letter of the older man’s had brought a simple and urgent invitation to come South and visit him.  So, pleased as a child with the plan, he wrote that he was coming on a certain Thursday, late in May.  The letter sent, he went about in a dream of the South, and when its answer, delighted and hospitable, came simultaneously with one of those bleak and windy turns of weather which make New York, even in May, a marvellously fitting place to leave, he could not wait.  Almost a week ahead of his time he packed his bag and took the Southwestern Limited, and on a bright Sunday morning he awoke in the old Phoenix Hotel in Lexington.  He had arrived too late the night before to make the fifteen miles to Fairfield, but he had looked over the horses in the livery-stable and chosen the one he wanted, for he meant to go on horseback, as a Southern gentleman should, to his domain.  That he meant to go alone, that no one, not even John Fairfield, knew of his coming, was not the least of his satisfactions, for the sight of the place of his forefathers, so long neglected, was becoming suddenly a sacred thing to him.  The old house and its young owner should meet each other like sweethearts, with no eyes to watch their greeting, their slow and sweet acquainting; with no living voices to drown the sound of the ghostly voices that must greet his home-coming from those walls—­voices of his people who had lived there, voices gone long since into eternal silence.

A little crowd of loungers stared with frank admiration at the young fellow who came out smiling from the door of the Phoenix Hotel, big and handsome in his riding clothes, his eyes taking in the details of girths and bits and straps with the keenness of a horseman.

Philip laughed as he swung into the saddle and looked down at the friendly faces, most of them black faces, below, “Good-by,” he said.  “Wish me good luck, won’t you?” and a willing chorus of “Good luck, boss,” came flying after him as the horse’s hoofs clattered down the street.