Barbara exulted, but Garnet was for peace. "I suppose you'll find Suez swarming with men, women, and horses." "Yes," said Champion--Fair was speaking to Barbara--"to say nothing of yahoos, centaurs, and niggehs." The Major's abundant laugh flattered him; he promised to join the party at luncheon, lifted his plumed shako, and galloped away. Garnet drove into the edge of the town at a trot. "Here's where the reservoir's to be," he said, and spun down the slope into the shaded avenue, and so to the town's centre. "Laws-a-me! Miss Barb," whispered Johanna, "but dis-yeh town is change'! New hotel! brick! th'ee sto'ies high!" Barbara touched her for silence. "But look at de new sto'es!" murmured the girl. Negroes--the men in dirty dusters, the women in smart calicoes, girls in dowdy muslins and boy's hats--and mountain whites, coatless men, shoeless women--hung about the counters dawdling away their small change. "Colored and white treated precisely alike, you notice," said Garnet, and Barbara suppressed a faint grunt from Johanna. Trade had spread into side-streets. Drinking-houses were gayly bedight and busy. "That's the new _Courier_ building." The main crowd had gone down to the railway tracks, and it was midsummer, yet you could see and feel the town's youth. "Why, the nig--colored people have built themselves a six-hundred dollar church; we white folks helped them," said Garnet, who had given fifty cents. "See that new sidewalk? Our chain-gang did that, sir; made the bricks and laid the pavement." The court-house was newly painted. Only Hotel Swanee and the two white churches remained untouched, sleeping on in green shade and sweet age. The Garnet's wheels bickered down the town's southern edge and out upon a low slope of yellow, deep-gullied sand and clay that scarce kept on a few weeds to hide its nakedness while gathering old duds and tins. "Yonder are the people, and here, sir," Garnet pointed to where the green Swanee lay sweltering like the Nile, "is the stream that makes the tears trickle in every true Southerner's heart when he hears its song." "Still 'Always longing for the old plantation?'" asked the youth. "Yes," said Barbara, defiantly. The carriage stopped; half a dozen black ragamuffins rushed up offering to take it in charge, and its occupants presently stood among the people of three counties. For Blackland, Clearwater, and Sandstone had gathered here a hundred or two of their gentlest under two long sheds on either side of the track, and the sturdier multitude under green booths or out in the sunlight about yonder dazzling gun, to hail the screaming herald of a new destiny; a destiny that openly promised only wealth, yet freighted with profounder changes; changes which, ban or delay them as they might, would still be destiny at last. Entering a shed Barbara laughed with delight. "Fannie!"