John Merryvale was growing old, people were beginning to say; and then would add that the world, when he should pass away, would miss an old-time gentleman. He was a tall, thin man, long of limb and deliberate of speech. The impatient northern guest who tried to hurry him with the mail could fidget to her fill without decreasing by a moment the time he chose to spend upon his task. He could not be hurried but he could easily be duped, and many of the acres that Lee Merryvale coveted, but saw in other hands, had slipped from his father's by reason of over-confidence in some speculator or old acquaintance. But, no matter how often he was imposed upon, he never lost his equanimity. The man who took advantage of him was not to be condemned; it was not his fault if he had not been born a gentleman; the overreaching tradesman was to be pitied. That he, John Merryvale, was to be pitied did not even enter his thoughts. The Negroes of the place loved and looked up to him, and he on his part treated them as beloved children. When they were ill he doctored them; when they quarreled, he acted as judge, and, without the cost of a lawsuit, gave them more rational judgment than they would have obtained in a court. While bearing a large part of the expense of the Episcopal church under the live-oaks at the water's edge, he helped to keep open the Methodist meeting among the pines where his black children went on Sunday mornings. He looked askance at first at Ellen; and while he never grew to like her ways, believing that she put false notions of equality into the children's heads, he was just and admitted that she had improved the morals of the place. For himself, he should always look upon the Negro as the white man's charge and make every allowance for his wrong-doing. What would be a sin in a white man, in a Negro would be only the misdemeanor of a child. Once, when one of his Negro tenants murdered a black neighbor in a drunken fight, he urged the judge to show clemency, to make the sentence lenient. "Remember," he admonished, "this man is black, and it is not one-tenth as bad for a black man to do a deed like this as for a white one." This attitude did not prevent his treating with respect the Negroes, men and women, whom he knew both at his own place and up and down the river, and they in their turn loved to drop a word with him, and looked with affectionate regard upon the tall figure in its well-worn cutaway coat, its straw hat with the black ribbon, its big, comfortable collar. One might see him of a Sunday walking among the pines, inquiring for Lucindy or Rose or Ebenezer, as the case might be.