"We might as well go," she answered, getting up. "There's nothing to be done here. Bob, you must write to me every other day. And Dan, I want you to see that his shoes are blacked every morning." And here, remembering the disrespect that I had shown her in the road, she seized her parasol as if to strike me. But with hypocritical gallantry (shrewd rascal that I was) I dropped upon one knee, caught her hand impulsively and assured her that my young master's comfort and good appearance should be the study of my life. And in her eyes there was a light of real kindliness. "There, get up," she said. "I am glad to see that you are improving. General, we may make a respectable servant of him yet." When the carriage had rolled away, Bob and I ran back to the room, locked the door, rubbed our joints with the fish-worm oil and wrestled with each other in ecstasy. CHAPTER VIII. How hallowed and sun-glinted that school life now seems to me. Many a grave has been opened and closed, the roots of many a greenbriar is embedded in the ashes of a heart that was once alive with fire, the fierce passion of life. The sun is still shining, and the arch of God's many-hued lithograph is still seen in the sky, and hearts have fire shut within them, but I wonder if the sun is as bright as it was in the long ago, if the rain-bow is as purple, if the fire in the heart is as glowing. Ah, and I know that my grand-children, in the far-away years to come, will lean feebly upon the gate and wonder if the world is as full of light as it was. Every emotion you have felt you may know has been felt by other men. It is this that makes nearly all poetry seem old; it is this that sends true poetry to the human heart. I will not linger over those days at school. I have sought thus far to picture my early life, not that it held incident, but that it revealed a condition. Time has been so sweeping, the hot blast that blew from the North was so scorching, and left such dried and brittle stems where green memories grew, that the youth of to-day can scarcely bring himself to comprehend that strange democratic absolutism which once existed in the South. And I wonder now that it could have lasted so long, though for years the wonder was that it could so soon have been broken up. How odd now it would seem to point out a man and say, "He once owned, in this land of freedom, a hundred human beings--owned them in body, but Christian-like yielded to God the direction of their souls." During the regular sessions, until he had reached his eighteenth year, my young master attended the Layfield Academy, and then he was entered at Center College. I had kept well up with him, a dead secret between us, for Old Mistress had more than once made him promise that I should be kept down upon the servants' proper level. But the secret was discovered and once it was held threateningly over me.