From the steps a narrow path ran by the kitchen, and skirting the garden-wall, straggled through the orchard and past the house of the overseer to the big barn and the cabins in the quarters. There was a light from the barn door, and as he passed he heard the sound of fiddles and the shuffling steps of the field hands in a noisy “game.” The words they sang floated out into the night, and with the squeaking of the fiddles followed him along his path. When he reached the quarters, he went from door to door, asking for his wife. “Is this Mahaley's cabin?” he anxiously inquired, “and has your mistress gone by?” In the first room an old negro woman sat on the hearth wrapping the hair of her grandchild, and she rose with a courtesy and a smile of welcome. At the question her face fell and she shook her head. “Dis yer ain' Mahaley, Marster,” she replied. “En dis yer ain' Mahaley's cabin--caze Mahaley she ain' never set foot inside my do', en I ain' gwine set foot at her buryin'.” She spoke shrilly, moved by a hidden spite, but the Governor, without stopping, went on along the line of open doors. In one a field negro was roasting chestnuts in the embers of a log fire, and while waiting he had fallen asleep, with his head on his breast and his gnarled hands hanging between his knees. The firelight ran over him, and as he slept he stirred and muttered something in his dreams. After the first glance, his master passed him by and moved on to the adjoining cabin. “Does Mahaley live here?” he asked again and yet again, until, suddenly, he had no need to put the question for from the last room he heard a low voice praying, and upon looking in saw his wife kneeling with her open Bible near the bedside. With his hat in his hand, he stood within the shadow of the doorway and waited for the earnest voice to fall silent. Mahaley was dying, this he saw when his glance wandered to the shrunken figure beneath the patchwork quilt; and at the same instant he realized how small a part was his in Mahaley's life or death. He should hardly have known her had he met her last week in the corn field; and it was by chance only that he knew her now when she came to die. As he stood there the burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws--events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave things were sweetened by an unconscious humour which was of the soil itself; and even death lost something of its strangeness when it came like the grateful shadow which falls over a tired worker in the field.