They had passed a woodrat's disorderly house of sticks and seen the rat run chattering up a tree with a young rat hanging to its tail. They had slept in the green russell chamber of a manor-house whose furnishings would not have shamed the Patroon and whose master entertained them with music upon the German flute; they had plucked dwarf wild-oranges from stunted, untended trees and ridden, at evening, up a grassy avenue heavy with the sweetness of magnolia-bloom; and once Andrew had seen a cinnamon-colored Indian stare at them for a moment out of the tangled underbrush with eyes black as obsidian beads, to vanish among the leaves as noiselessly as a puff of dandelion seed. Now the shadows were long with late afternoon, the road skirted the river, and New Sparta was near. "There," said Dr. Gentian as they came to a fork in the road. Andrew followed the line of his hand and made out a clot of white among distant trees. "The upper road is ours, Mr. Beard--the lower goes down to the colony itself. You shall see it soon enough. For the present," he smiled, "I imagine you have ridden hard enough these last days to postpone the pleasure. The best lands are farther down the river--that is why you see no signs of our industry here." "I thought you lived in the colony itself, sir," said Andrew, making conversation. "Not precisely," Dr. Gentian was very amiable, "My own house is over a mile from the wharves--you see, indigo needs space and we have more than a thousand souls in the settlement itself--there were more at first but one always loses a number when men are transplanted to a new climate--" He chatted on, describing his newly-finished sugar-mill and the system of irrigation he had recently completed. Andrew fell more and more under the spell of that easy, Cæsarean voice. Beside this man, with his tales of strange travel in the Indies and the Greek Islands, with his casual chat of the great ones of London and Paris, even Alexander Beard began to seem a little provincial. Now he quoted a passage from the Georgics to illustrate a point in husbandry, and turned from that to a discussion as to whether Dr. Goldsmith's "She Stoops to Conquer," witty though it was, might fitly be compared to the best of the comedies of Plautus. Andrew felt his own mammoth ignorance descend upon him like a heavy velvet pall and thought humbly that Lucius should have come in his place. He resolved to write to Lucius for the best edition of Plautus procurable at Garret Noel's bookshop before the week was out.