Occasionally Miss Sally met girls or young men on dashing horses, and these merry people saluted her cordially in passing. But in all that blue-grass region, where each member of every comfortable family had his own gaited saddle-horse, there was not a finer animal than Miss Sally’s Pacer. Cæsar and his fortune were aboard when she mounted. Pacer was her entire capital in life, carrying her on visits among good families whereby she subsisted, and furnishing colts for her pin-money. The camel is not more to the Bedouin. Had Pacer failed Miss Sally in any point, she must have fallen into the straits of a reduced gentlewoman, instead of carrying a high head through all the best houses of the county. She rode at a steady hand gallop through the sultry day, though a young colt whinnied behind her; increasing her speed past one pillared brick house set far up an avenue. The woods about it were close trimmed and free from underbrush, like all Kentucky woodland. Some evergreens made gloom about its eaves, but not such gloom as the reputation of the house itself. There lived a man who was said to have a chain stretched across his cellar. He bought up slaves and handcuffed them in pairs along this chain until he was ready to drive them to market, when a band of musicians was employed to lead their march, cheerfully playing “Yankee Doodle.” The house was worse than haunted. Both whites and blacks hurried past its handsome gate with abhorrence--spot of mystery and abomination on those pleasant corn lands. Miss Sally was anxious to get out of her riding-skirt at Poynton’s, and bully the black boy who would come to take her bridle. The wealthiest slave-owner in Kentucky could not exact more deference. Everybody humored her. In a country where hospitality was a social religion, her little visits of a month or two were welcomed even when they crowded dearer guests. And in spite of fine traits concealed under the haughty airs of a nomad, well did she know how to crowd people distasteful to her. When she turned into Poynton’s avenue, the white pillared mansion seemed to doze. The quarters stretched in a long row fieldward. Miss Sally could not see the kitchen, standing by itself behind the great house. No drowsiness had settled there. A stir of preparation was going on, not only for the two o’clock dinner, but for the wedding yet a week distant. Miss Sally had omitted one place in her rounds, and shortened her visit at another, that she might be at Poynton’s in time to gather every detail of the wedding. A yellow boy skipped out to help her at the mounting-block. He would have lounged to meet his master. Approvingly she saw him pull his hat to her. “Miss Sally, you sho’ly bake you’se’f to-day!” “Yes, it’s hot, Peach. And if you’re concerned for me I hope you’ll feel more concern about Pacer.” Miss Vandewater’s anxiety about her property grew in the ratio of its approach to a crib.