A gentle wind stirred overhead, and I smelt the sharp sweet fragrance of the sycamore, which cast a delicate lace-work of shadows on the crooked brick pavement. Not only the great sycamore and myself and Samuel, but the whole blossoming city appeared to me in a dream; and as I glanced down the quiet street, over which the large, slow shadows moved to and fro, I saw through a mist the blurred grey-green foliage in the Capitol Square. In the ground the seeds of the new South, which was in truth but the resurrected spirit of the old, still germinated in darkness. But the air, though I did not know it, was already full of the promise of the industrial awakening, the constructive impulse, the recovered energy, that was yet to be, and in which I, leaning there a barefooted market boy, was to have my part. An aged negress, in a red bandanna turban, with a pipe in her mouth, stopped to rest in the shadow of the sycamore, placing her basket, full of onions and tomatoes, on the pavement beside my empty one. "Do you know who lives in that grey house, Mammy?" I asked. Twisting the stem of her pipe to the corner of her mouth, she sat nodding at me, while the wind fluttered the wisps of grizzled hair escaping from beneath her red and yellow head-dress. "Go 'way, chile, whar you done come f'om?" she demanded suspiciously. "Ain't you ever hyern er Marse Bland? He riz me." I shook my head, sufficiently humbled by my plebeian ignorance. "Are the two old ladies his daughters?" "Wat you call Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca ole fur? Dey ain' ole," she responded indignantly. "I use'n ter b'long ter Marse Bland befo' de war, en I kin recollect de day dat e'vy one er dem wuz born. Dey's all daid now cep'n Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca, en Marse Bland he's daid, too." "Then who is the little girl? Where did she come from?" There was a dandelion blooming in a tuft of grass between the loosened bricks of the pavement, and I imprisoned it in my bare toes while I waited impatiently for her answer. "Dat's Miss Sary's chile. She ran away wid Marse Harry Mickleborough, in Marse Bland's lifetime, en he 'ouldn't lay eyes on her f'om dat day ter his deaf. Miss Mitty en Miss Matoaca dey ain' ole, but Miss Sary she want nuttin' mo'n a chile w'en she went off." "But why did her father never see her again?"