He nodded awkwardly and admitted, with a muttered reservation, that the weather might be worse.  Then he looked at Nicholas.  “If you ain’t got nothin’ better to do I reckon you might lend a hand at the ploughin’,” he surlily suggested.

“Why, so I might,” assented Nicholas good-humouredly.  “I’ve a couple of hours free.”

He fastened more securely the branch in the horse’s bridle; then, raising his hat, he turned and vaulted the whitewashed fence, while Eugenia, touching her horse into a gallop, vanished in the distance of the open road, blazing her track with scarlet gum leaves that scattered royally in the wind.

As Nicholas passed the peanut field he nodded pleasantly to the congregation of negroes assembled for the annual festival called “a picking.”  They ranged in degrees from Uncle Ish, the oldest representative of his race, to Betsey’s five-year-old Jeremiah, who had already been detected in an attempt to filch the nuts from an overturned shock, and was being soundly admonished by his mother’s avenging palm.  The ground was strewn with baskets and buckets of varying dimensions, into which the nuts were gathered before being consigned to the huge hamper guarded by Amos Burr.  A hoarse clamour, like that produced by a flock of crows, went up from the animated swarm as it settled to work.

Nicholas crossed to the adjoining field and ploughed deep furrows in the soil, going into breakfast with the smell of the warm earth about him and the glow of exercise in his blood.  He ate heartily and listened without remark to the political vagaries of his father.  Amos Burr had been “looking into politics” of late, and his stubborn wits had been fixed by a grievance.  “If he was a fool befo’ now, he’s a plum fool now,” Marthy Burr had observed dispassionately.  “I ain’t never seen no head so level that it could bear the lettin’ in of politics.  It makes a fool of a man and a worse fool of a fool.  The government’s like a mule, it’s slow and it’s sure; it’s slow to turn, and it’s sure to turn the way you don’t want it.”

“I tell you it’s done promised to help the farmer,” put in Amos heavily, bringing his large red hand down upon the table.  “Ain’t it been helpin’ the manufacturer all these years?  Ain’t it been lookin’ arter the labourer, black an’ white?  Ain’t it time for it to keep its word to the farmer?”

“In the meantime I’d finish that piece of ploughing, if I were you,” suggested Nicholas.  “The more work in the fall the less in the spring—­that’s a proverb for you.”

“I don’t want no proverb,” returned Amos sullenly.  “I want my rights, an’ I want the country to give ’em to me.”

“I ain’t never seen no good come of settin’ down an’ wishin’ for rights,” remarked his wife tartly.  “It’s a sight better to be up an’ plantin’.”