Some logs blazed comfortably, and awoke in both man and youth the thoughtfulness which lays such a silence upon us with the kindling of the earliest Autumn fires. Talk between them was never forced. It came, it went: they were at perfect ease with one another in their comradeship. The man's long thoughts went backward; the youth's long thoughts went forward. The man was smoking, at intervals serenely drawing his amber-hued meerschaum from under his thick mustache. The youth was not smoking--he was waiting to be a man. Once his uncle had remarked: "Tobacco is for men if they wish tobacco, and for pioneer old ladies if they must have their pipes. Begin to smoke after you are a man, Downs. Cigars for boys are as bad as cigars would be for old ladies." The way in which this had been put rather captured the youth's fancy: he was determined to have every inward and outward sign of being a man: now he was waiting for the cigar. He had been hunting with Fred Ousley that afternoon, and just before dark had come in with a good bag of birds. A drizzle of rain had overtaken him in the fields and dampened his clothing. The truth is that he and Ousley had lingered over their good-by; Fred was off for college. Supper was over when he reached the house, and he had merely washed his hands and gone in to supper as he was, eating alone; and now as he sat gazing into the fire, his boots and his hunting-trousers and his dark blue flannel shirt began to steam. He was too much a youth to mind wet garments. The man on the opposite side sent secret glances across at him: they were full of pride, of a man's idolatry of a scion of his own blood. He was thinking of the blood of that family--blood never to be forced or hurried: death rather than being commanded: rage at being ordered: mingled of Scotch and Irish and Anglo-Saxon--with the Kentucky wildness and insolence added. Blood that often wallowed in the old mires of humanity; then later in life by a process of unfolding began to set its course toward the virtues of the world and ultimately stood where it filled lower men with awe. September was the month for the opening of schools and colleges. The boy's education had been difficult and desultory. First he had gone to the neighborhood school, then to a boys' select school, then to a military school, then to a college. Usually he quit and came home. Once he had joined his uncle in another State at the Autumn meeting of a racing association--had merely walked up to him on the grounds, eating purple grapes out of a paper bag and with his linen trousers pockets bulging with ripe peaches. "Well, Downs," his uncle observed by way of greeting him, as though he had reappeared round a corner. "Who won the last race?" inquired the boy as though he had been absent ten minutes.