The train was slackening for a wayside station.  Outside a man was driving a plough across a field where grain had been harvested.  Nicholas followed with his eyes the walk of the horses, the purple-brown trail of the plough, the sturdy, independent figure of the driver as he passed, whistling an air.  Over the Virginian landscape—­the landscape of a country where each ragged inch of ground wears its strange, distinctive charm, where each rotting “worm fence” guards a peculiar beauty for those who know it—­lay the warm hush of full-blown summer.

The man at the plough aroused in Nicholas Burr a sudden exhilaration as of physical exertion.  It brought back his boyhood which had brightened as he had passed farther from it, and he felt that it would be good on such an afternoon to follow the horses across fields that were odorous of the upturned earth.

The train went on slowly, with the shiftless slouch of Southern trains, the man at the plough vanished, and Nicholas returned to his thoughts.

The years had been almost breathless in their flight.  He had put himself to a purpose, and he had lost sight of all things save its fulfilment.  The success that men spoke of with astonished eyes—­the transformation of the barefooted boy into the triumphant politician, had a firm foundation, he knew, though others did not.  It was his capacity for toil that had made him—­not his intellect, but his ability to persevere—­the power which, in the old days, had successfully carried him through Jerry Pollard’s store.  As chairman of the Democratic Party, men had called his campaigns brilliant.  He alone knew the tedious processes, the infinite patience from which these triumphs had evolved—­he alone knew the secret and the security of his success.

The train stopped with a lurch.

“Kingsborough, sir!” said the conductor with a friendly touch upon his arm.

He started abruptly from his reverie, lifted his bag, and left the car.  On the platform outside a group of stragglers recognised him, and there was a hearty cheer followed by frantic handshakes.  The incident pleased him, and he spoke to each man singly, calling him by name.  The sheriff was one of them, and the clerk of the court, and the old negro sexton of the church.  There was a fervour in their congratulations which brought the warmth to his eyes.  He was glad that the men who had known him in his poverty should rise so cordially to approve his success.

He left the station, walking rapidly to the judge’s house.  He had frequently returned to Kingsborough, but to-day the changes of the last fifteen years struck him with a sensation of surprise.  The wide, white street, half in sunshine, half in shadow, trailed its drowsy length into the open country where the roads were filled with grass and dust.  He noticed with a pang that the ivy had been torn from the church and that the glazed brick walls flaunted a nudity that was almost immodest.  He had remembered it as a bower of shade—­a gigantic bird’s nest.  He saw that ancient elms were rapidly decaying, and when he reached the judge’s garden he found that the syringa and the lilacs had vanished.  The garden had faced the destroyer in the plough, and trim vegetables thrived where gaudy blossoms had once rioted.