"He liked it," said the girl. "But, if you will give my message to Tom, I won't come in. I am looking for Dudley Webb, and I see his mother at her gate. Good-bye! Be sure and tell Tom to come Sunday."
She nodded brightly, lifted her muslin skirts, and recrossed the street. The judge watched her until the flutter of her white dress vanished down the lane of maples; then he turned to speak to the occupants of a carriage that had drawn up to the sidewalk.
The vehicle was of an old-fashioned make, bare of varnish, with rickety, mud-splashed wheels and rusty springs. It was drawn by an ill-matched pair of horses and driven by a lame coloured boy, who carried a peeled hickory branch for a whip.
"Ah, General Battle," said the judge to a stout gentleman with a red face and an expansive shirt front from which the collar had wilted away; "fine afternoon! Is that Eugenia?" to a little girl of seven or eight years, with a puppy of the pointer breed in her arms, and "How are you, Sampson?" to the coloured driver.
The three greeted him simultaneously, whereupon he leaned forward, resting his hand upon the side of the carriage.
"The young folks are growing up," he said. "I have just seen Juliet Burwell, and, on my life, she gets prettier every day. We shan't keep her long."
"Keep her!" replied the general vigorously, wiping his large face with a large pocket handkerchief. "Keep her! If I were thirty years younger, you shouldn't keep her a day—not a day, sir."
The little girl looked up gravely from the corner of the seat, tossing her short, dark plait from her shoulder. "What would you do with her, papa?" she asked. "We've got no place to put her at home."
The general threw back his great head and laughed till his wide girth shook like a bag of meal.
"Oh, you needn't worry, Eugie," he said. "I'm not the man I used to be. She wouldn't look at me. Bless your heart, she wouldn't look at me if I asked her—"
Eugenia clasped her puppy closer and turned her eyes upon her father's jovial face.
"I don't see how she could help it if you stood in front of her," she answered gravely, in a voice rich with the blending of negro intonations.
The general shook again until the carriage creaked on its rusty springs, and the coloured boy, Sampson, let the reins fall and joined in the hilarity.
"She won't let me so much as look at a girl!" exclaimed the general delightedly, stooping to recover the brown linen lap robe which had slipped from his knees. "She's as jealous as if I were twenty and had a score of sweethearts."
The little girl did not reply, but she flushed angrily. "Don't, precious," she said to the puppy, who was licking her cheek with his warm, red tongue.
"What have you named him, Eugie?" asked the judge, changing the subject with that gracious tact which was mindful of the least emergency. "He is nicely marked, I see."
"I call him Jim," replied Eugenia. She spoke gravely, and the gravity contrasted oddly with the animation of her features. "But his real name is James Burwell Battle. Bernard and I christened him in the spring-house—so he'll go to heaven."
"Cap'n Burwell gave him to her, you know," explained the general, who laughed whenever his daughter spoke, as if the fact of her talking at all was a source of amazement to him, "and she hasn't let go of him since she got him. By the way, Judge, you have a first-rate garden spot. I hear your asparagus is the finest in town. Ours is very poor this year. I must have a new bed made before next season. Ah, what is it, daughter?"
"You've forgotten to buy the sugar," said Eugenia, "and Aunt Chris can't put up her preserves. And you told me to remind you of the whip—"
"Bless your heart, so I did. Sampson lost that whip a month ago, and I've never remembered it yet. Well, good-day—good-day."
The judge raised his hat with a stately inclination; the general nodded good-naturedly, still grasping the linen robe with his plump, red hand; and the carriage jolted along the green and disappeared behind the glazed brick walls of the church.
The judge regarded his walking-stick meditatively for a moment, and continued his way. The smile with which he had followed the vanishing figure of Juliet Burwell returned to his face, and his features softened from their usual chilly serenity.
He had gone but a short distance and was passing the iron gate of the churchyard, when the droning of a voice came to him, and looking beyond the bars, he saw little Nicholas Burr lying at full length upon a marble slab, his head in his hands and his feet waving in the air.
Entering the gate, the judge followed the walk of moss-grown stones leading to the church steps, and paused within hearing of the voice, which went on in an abstracted drawl.
"The most cel-e-bra-ted sys-tem of juris-pru-dence known to the world begins, as it ends, with a code—" He was not reading, for the book was closed. He seemed rather to be repeating over and over again words which had been committed to memory.
"With a code. From the commencement to the close of its history, the ex-posi-tors of Ro-man Law con-sistently em-ployed lan-guage which implied that the body of their sys-tem rested on the twelve De-cem-viral Tables—Dec-em-vi-ral—De-cem-vi-ral Tables."
"Bless my soul!" said the judge. The boy glanced up, blushed, and would have risen, but the judge waved him back.
"No—no, don't get up. I heard you as I was going by. What are you doing?"
"Learnin'."
"Learning! Dear me! What do you mean by learning?"
"I'm learnin' by heart, sir—and—and, if you don't mind, sir, what does j-u-r-i-s-p-r-u-d-e-n-c-e mean?"
The judge started, returning the boy's eager gaze with one of kindly perplexity.
"Bless my soul!" he said again. "You aren't trying to understand that, are you?"
The boy grew scarlet and his lips trembled. "No, sir," he answered. "I'm jest learnin' it now. I'll know what it means when I'm bigger—"
"And you expect to remember it?" asked the judge.
"I don't never forget," said the boy.
"Bless my soul!" exclaimed the judge for the third time.
For a moment he stood looking silently down upon the marble slab with its defaced lettering. Of the wordy epitaph which had once redounded to the honour of the bones beneath there remained only the words "who departed," but he read these with a long abstracted gaze.
"Let me see," he said at last, speaking with his accustomed dignity. "Did you ever go to school, Nicholas?"
"Yes, sir."
"When?"
"I went 'most three winters, sir, but I had to leave off on o'count o' pa's not havin' any hand 'cep'n me."
The judge smiled.
"Ah, well," he returned. "We'll see if you can't begin again. My boy has a tutor, you know, and his playmates come to study with him. He's about your age, and it will give you a start. Come in to-morrow at nine, and we'll talk it over. No, don't get up. I am going."
And he passed out of the churchyard, closing the heavy gate with a metallic clang. Nicholas lay on the marble slab, but the book slipped from his hands, and he gazed straight before him at the oriel window, where the ivy was tremulous with the shining bodies and clamorous voices of nesting sparrows. They darted swiftly from gable to gable, filling the air with shrill sounds of discord, and endowing with animation the inanimate pile, wrapping the dead bricks in a living shroud.
On the other side swept the long, colourless grasses, rippling in faint waves like a still lake that reflects the sunshine and swaying lightly beneath myriads of gauzy-winged bees that flashed