Down it now came a little girl—the flower of all those dead and gone—and her coming was just as though one of the flowers about her had stepped from its gay company on one or the other side of the path to make through them a dainty, triumphal march as the fairest of them all. At the dial she paused and her impatient blue eyes turned to a bend of the yellow river for the first glimpse of a gay barge that soon must come. At the wharf the song of negroes rose as they unloaded the boat just from Richmond. She would go and see if there was not a package for her mother and perhaps a present for herself, so with another look to the river bend she turned, but she moved no farther. Instead, she gave a little gasp, in which there was no fear, though what she saw was surely startling enough to have made her wheel in flight. Instead, she gazed steadily into a pair of grave black eyes that were fixed on her from under a green branch that overhung the footpath, and steadily she searched the figure standing there, from the coonskin cap down the fringed hunting-shirt and fringed breeches to the moccasined feet. And still the strange figure stood arms folded, motionless and silent. Neither the attitude nor the silence was quite pleasing, and the girl’s supple slenderness stiffened, her arms went rigidly to her sides, and a haughty little snap sent her undimpled chin upward. “What do you want?” And still he looked, searching her in turn from head to foot, for he was no more strange to her than she was to him. “Who are you and what do you want?” It was a new way for a woman to speak to a man; he in turn was not pleased, and a gleam in his eyes showed it. “I am the son of a king.” She started to laugh, but grew puzzled, for she had the blood of Pocahontas herself. “You are an Indian?” He shook his head, scorning to explain, dropped his rifle to the hollow of his arm, and, reaching for his belt where she saw the buckhorn handle of a hunting-knife, came toward her, but she did not flinch. Drawing a letter from the belt, he handed it to her. It was so worn and soiled that she took it daintily and saw on it her father’s name. The boy waved his hand toward the house far up the path. “He live here?” “You wish to see him?” The boy grunted assent, and with a shock of resentment the little lady started up the path with her head very high indeed. The boy slipped noiselessly after her, his face unmoved, but his eyes were darting right and left to the flowers, trees, and bushes, to every flitting, strange bird, the gray streak of a scampering squirrel, and what he could not see, his ears took in—the clanking chains of work-horses, the whir of a quail, the screech of a peacock, the songs of negroes from far-off fields.