That afternoon I went home, full of hope, to my attic in the Old Market quarter. Then as the weeks went on, and I took my place gradually as a small laborious worker in the buzzing hive of human industry, whatever romance had attached itself to the tobacco factory, scattered and vanished in the hard, dry atmosphere of the reality. My part was to run errands up and down the dark staircase for the manager of the leaf department, or to stand for hours on hot days in the stagnant air, amid the reeking smells of the big room, where the army of "stemmers" rocked ceaselessly back and forth to the sound of their savage music. In all those weary weeks I had passed General Bolingbroke but once, and by the blank look on his great perspiring face, I saw that my hero had forgotten utterly the incident of my existence. Yet as I turned on the curbing and looked after him, while he ploughed, wiping his forehead, up the long hill, under the leaves of mulberry and catalpa trees, I felt instinctively that my future triumphs would be in a measure the overthrow of the things for which he and his generation had stood. The manager's casual phrase "the old families," had bred in me a secret resentment, for I knew in my heart that the genial aristocracy, represented by the president of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad, was in reality the enemy, and not the friend, of such as I. The long, hot summer unfolded slowly while I trudged to the factory in the blinding mornings and back again to the Old Market at the suffocating hour of sunset. Over the doors of the negro hovels luxuriant gourd vines hung in festoons of large fan-shaped leaves, and above the high plank fences at the back, gaudy sunflowers nodded their heads to me as I went wearily by. The richer quarter of the city had blossomed into a fragrant bower, but I saw only the squalid surroundings of the Old Market, with its covered wagons, its overripe melons, its prowling dogs hunting in refuse heaps, and beyond this the crooked street, which led to the tobacco factory and then sagged slowly down to the river-bottom. Sometimes I would lean from my little window at night into the stifling atmosphere, where the humming of a mosquito, or the whirring of a moth, made the only noise, and think of the enchanted garden lying desolate and lovely under the soft shining of the stars. Were the ghosts moving up and down the terraces in the mazes of scented box, I wondered? Then the garden would fade far away from me into a cool, still distance, while I knelt with my head in my hands, panting for breath in the motionless air. Outside the shadow of the Old Market lay over all, stretching sombre and black to where I crouched, a lonely, half-naked child at my attic window. And so at last, bathed in sweat, I would fall asleep, to awaken at dawn when the covered wagons passed through the streets below, and the cry of "Wa-ter-mil-lion! Wa-ter-mil-lion!" rang in the silence.