“I bound dem boys is huntin’ squorls over in de swamp, or mebbe dey’s monkeyin’ aroun’ dat wash-hole,” the old man murmured doubtfully. “Dat house shore do ’pear powerful still ’thout dem noisy, aggervatin’ bullies bellerin’ to each yuther.” Popsy fumbled feebly through his pockets and brought his hands out empty. “Dem dum boys is mighty stingy wid deir chawin’ terbacker,” he mumbled in an irritated tone. “Dey don’t gimme half enough to keep me runnin’! Sence Tom hitched up wid dat pretty Mis’ Mildred, he done lef’ off chawin’, an dat cuts down my ’lowance. Nev’ mind! I knows whar dem dum boys keep deir chawin’, an’ I’ll ’vent some excuse to go to de house an’ I’ll holp myse’f liberal.” Suddenly Popsy Spout remembered certain boyish pranks which Tom and Jim and Henry had played upon him fifty years before. He dimly recalled finding his tables and chairs hanging from the limbs of trees, his bed carried over in the cow-pasture and placed in the middle of the field, his few cooking pots crowning the tops of fence-posts around his cabin! “Hod zickety!” he exclaimed. “I bound dem rapscallions is pesticatin’ my Ca’lline plum’ to death!” He turned away from the gate and hurried as rapidly as his feeble legs would carry him down the road. When at last he reached the cabin, he sat down upon the big stone step completely exhausted. A big pecan tree stood in front of the house, its wide-spreading branches completely shading the front yard. Under this tree three of Popsy’s piccaninnies had romped, and countless generations of hound puppies had rolled in the dust, and scratched in the sand at its roots. To Popsy’s left was the big stone spring-house, the roof entirely gone, and leaves and branches had blown into the four walls and choked the stream which flowed from the hillside. “I been aimin’ to fix dat roof,” Popsy murmured. “It ’pears like I cain’t hardly find time to do nothin’, I got to wuck fer de white folks so hard.” He turned and looked behind him. Two doors opened out upon the front porch, and the two rooms visible to him were furnished. Having seen the furniture in Scootie’s cabin, he recognized it now, and thought it was the furniture of his old home fifty years before. Then one of the bizarre conceits of second childhood knocked upon the crumbling portals of his brain and found admittance. He thought that he was a young man again, and that the buxom negro girl whom he had married in the presence of the white folks up yonder on the hill in the drawing-room of the Gaitskill home, was still alive, and occupied this cabin with him. “Ca’lline! Ca’lline!” he called sharply. But Caroline, sleeping in her narrow, silent chamber under a scrub-oak tree on a hillside in Alabama, made no answer. “Ca’lline!” he called again, in a voice which he tried to make loud, but which failed through weakness. “Ca’lline! Cain’t you hear me callin’ you?”