There was music in the drawing-room, soft and gentle, and the accompanying voice was tremulous with suppressed emotion.  Gradually it swells in volume until it fills the spacious apartment, and the clear notes from the tender trill rose grandly in full, clear tones, full of pathetic melody, and now they almost shriek.  They cease—­and the laugh, hysterical and shrill, echoes through the entire house.  The judge was silent; but a close observer might have seen a slight contraction of the lips, and a slighter closing of the eyes.  A moment after Alice entered the room, and there was a glance exchanged between her brother and herself.  There was in it a meaning only for themselves.

“You have been riding, sir,” he said to his guest, “and my sister tells me to the mound at the White Apple village.  To those curious in such legends as are connected with its history, it is an interesting spot.  All I know in relation to these, I acquired from a dreamy and solitary man employed by my father to fit myself and brother for college.  He read French, and was fond of tracing all he could find in the writings of the historians of the first settlement of Louisiana and Mississippi, and of the history, habits, and customs of the aborigines of the country.  He knew something of the adventures of De Soto and La Salle, and something of the traditions of the Natchez.  He was a melancholy man, and perished by his own hand in the chamber that you occupy.  My sister is curious in such matters, and from her researches in some old musty volumes she has found in the possession of an old European family, she has made quite a history of the Natchez, and from the old servants much of that of the first white or English occupants of this section.  For myself, I have little curiosity in that way.  My business forbids much reading of that kind, and indeed much of anything else, and I am glad that my tastes and my business accord.  I would not exchange one crop of cotton grown on the village-field, for a perfect knowledge of the history of every Indian tribe upon the continent.”

“I am no antiquarian, sir.  A life on a plantation I suppose must be most irksome and monotonous to a young lady, unless she should have some resource besides her rural employments.”

“Our only amusements, sir,” said Alice, “are reading, riding, and music, with an occasional visit to a neighbor.  I ride through the old forest and consult the great patriarchal trees, and they tell me many strange stories.  When the ruthless axe has prostrated one of these forest monarchs, my good palfrey waits for me, and I count the concentric circles and learn his age.  Some I have seen which have yielded to man’s use or cupidity who have looked over the younger scions of the woods, and upon the waters of the mighty river a thousand years.”

“Indeed, miss,” replied the guest, “I had not supposed the natural life of any of our forest trees extended beyond three, or at most four centuries.”