The snow lay deep, on this night of which I tell you,--a night somewhere near the first of January in this year. Two old men, a white and a black, who were rooting about the farm-yard from stable to fodder-rack, waded through deep drifts of it. "Tell yer, Mars' Joe," said the negro, banging the stable-door, "dat hoss ort n't ter risk um's bones dis night. Ef yer go ter de Yankee meetin', Coly kern't tote yer." "Well, well, Uncle Bone, that's enough," said old Scofield testily, looking through the stall-window at the horse, with a face anxious enough to show that the dangers of foundering for Coly and for the Union were of about equal importance in his mind. A heavily built old fellow, big-jointed, dull-eyed, with a short, black pipe in his mouth, going about peering into sheds and out-houses,--the same routine he and Bone had gone through every night for thirty years,--joking, snarling, cursing, alternately. The cramped old routine, dogged, if you choose to call it so, was enough for him: you could tell that by a glance at his earnest, stolid face; you could see that it need not take Prospero's Ariel forty minutes to put a girdle about this man's world: ten would do it, tie up the farm, and the dead and live Scofields, and the Democratic party, with an ideal reverence for "Firginya" under all. As for the Otherwhere, outside of Virginia, he heeded it as much as a Hindoo does the turtle on which the earth rests. For which you shall not sneer at Joe Scofield, or the Pagan. How wide is your own "sacred soil"?--the creed, government, bit of truth, other human heart, self, perhaps, to which your soul roots itself vitally,--like a cuttle-fish sucking to an inch of rock,--and drifts out palsied feelers of recognition into the ocean of God's universe, just as languid as the aforesaid Hindoo's hold upon the Kalpas of emptiness underneath the turtle? Joe Scofield sowed the fields and truck-patch,--sold the crops down in Wheeling; every year he got some little, hardly earned snugness for the house (he and Bone had been born in it, their grandfathers had lived there together). Bone was his slave; of course, they thought, how should it be otherwise? The old man's daughter was Dode Scofield; his negro was Bone Scofield, in degree. Joe went to the Methodist church on Sundays; he hurrahed for the Democratic candidate: it was a necessity for Whigs to be defeated; it was a necessity for Papists to go to hell. He had a tight grip on these truths, which were born, one might say, with his blood; his life grew out of them. So much of the world was certain,--but outside? It was rather vague there: Yankeedom was a mean-soiled country, whence came clocks, teachers, peddlers, and infidelity; and the English,--it was an American's birthright to jeer at the English.