The drive from the farm through the forest solitude back to the highway was haunted by the sad or savage black faces starting up before us as in the woodland road, and was not cheered by the lamps in the windows of the moldering hamlet of Moultrie. Ruin seemed to have grown upon the place since we had seen it an hour before, and a decay at once eerie and ramshackle invested the forsaken villa on rising ground beyond the estuary where the little oysters mustered their serried ranks in the ebb-tide of the muddy flats. This villa could never have been very impressive itself, but the massive stone posts of the gateways approaching it were of even undue grandeur; otherwise the unpainted wood of the local architecture, which had never known dignity nor beauty, was of that repulsive forlornness which seems characteristic of the Southern farm or village house in its decay. Yet if the ground has once been cleared of all that man has builded for the shelter of his love or pride, there is sometimes a charm in the utter effacement. One day of another year another driver carried us by a place where he said he used to bring a lady from the North whose family home it had once been, and where, beyond the squalor of a negro suburb, an opening in the scrub-pine and palmetto stretched a wilding lawn under gray live-oaks and shining magnolias growing apart from one another as if from intention rather than by accident. It was so fit a place for the mansion which had once stood there in the stately keeping of the slave-holding past that one must look twice to make sure that the vanished home was not haunting the scene. The Northern lady who frequented it was only far off akin to those who had once dwelt there, and it did not seem that her visits were the effect of family piety; but she came and came as long as she remained in St. Augustine, and as we should have come if we had remained in reach of the beautiful, wistful spot.