Martha was a most devoted soul who had come from the North with her mistress when that lady left her New England home to journey to Maryland as Commander Stewart’s bride.  He was only a junior lieutenant then, but that was nearly eighteen years before this story opens.  She had not seen many colored people while living in the Massachusetts town in which she had been born and her experience with them was limited to the very few who, after the Civil War, had drifted into it.  Of the true Southern negro, especially those of the ante-bellum type, she had not the faintest conception.  It had all been a revelation to her.  The devotion of the house servants to their “white folks,” to whom so many had remained faithful even after liberation, was a never-ending source of wonder to the good soul.  Nor could she understand why those old family retainers stigmatized the younger generations as “shiftless, no-account, new-issue niggers.”  That there could be marked social distinctions among these colored people never occurred to her.

That generations of them had been carefully trained by master and mistress during the days of slavery, and that the younger generations had had no training whatever, was quite beyond Martha’s grasp.  Colored people were colored people, and that ended it.

But as the years passed, Martha learned many things.  She had her own neatly-appointed little dining-room in her own well-ordered little wing of the great, rambling colonial house which Peggy Stewart called home, a house which could have told a wonderful history of one hundred eighty or more years.  We will tell it later on.  We have left Peggy too long perched upon her snake-fence with Shashai and Tzaritza.

The lilting song continued to its end and the dog and horse stood as though hypnotized by the melody and the fingers’ magnetic touch.  Then the song ended as abruptly as it had begun and Peggy slid lightly from her perch to the ground, raised both arms, stretching hands and fingers and inclining her head in a pose which would have thrilled a teacher of “Esthetic Posing” in some fashionable, faddish school, though it was all unstudied upon the girl’s part.  Then she cried in a wonderfully modulated voice: 

“Oh, the joy, joy, joy of just being alive on such a day as this!  Of being out in this wonderful world and free, free, free to go and come and do as we want to, Shashai, Tzaritza!  To feel the wind, to breathe it in, to smell all the new growing things, to see that water out yonder and the blue overhead.  What is it, Dr. Llewellyn says:  ’To thank the Lord for a life so sweet.’  We all do, don’t we? I can put it into words, or sing it, but you two?  Yes, you can make God understand just as well.  Let’s all thank Him together—­you as He has taught you, and I as He has taught me.  Now:” 

It was a strange picture.  The girl standing there in the beautiful early spring world, her only companions a thoroughbred, half-wild Kentucky colt and a Russian wolfhound, literally worth their weight in gold, absolutely faultless in their beauty, and each with their wonderfully intelligent eyes fixed upon her.  At the word “Now,” the colt raised his perfect head, drew in a deep breath and then exhaled it in a long, trumpet-like whinny.  The dog voiced her wonderful bell-like bay; the note of joy sounded by her kind when victory is assured.