The road into which we had turned was a narrow private way, very steep and rocky, which led between rotting “worm” fences and neglected fields to a dense avenue of cedars on the brow of the hill. As we went on, I wondered why the fields so near the house should be abandoned. The remains of last year’s harvest still strewed the ragged furrows, and against the skyline on the top of the hill there was a desolate row of corn stubble. Presently, as the carriage jolted over the rocky road, I heard the sound of barking, or, as it seemed to me at that sombre hour, the kind of baying to which hounds give voice on moonlit nights. Then, when we reached the high ground at last, I found that two black and yellow hounds were sitting amid the naked cornstalks and barking at our approach. “Won’t these fields be planted this year?” I asked in surprise. “We can’t get any of the darkeys to work here,” replied the driver. “They are too near the house.” As we came to the brow of the hill the dogs ran to meet us, and then, after a few barks of welcome, turned and padded on noiselessly beside the horses. Between us and the beginning of the cedar avenue there was a clear space of road, and when we reached this the veil over the sunset parted suddenly like a curtain, and a glow, which I can compare to nothing except clouded amber, suffused the horizon and the abandoned cornfields. In this glow I discerned the gigantic shape of an old mulberry tree near the avenue; and the next instant I made out, amid the foliage on the high boughs, the lightly poised figure of a little boy in a blue cotton suit, with a mass of streaming ruddy curls. “Why, he might slip and fall,” I thought; and the words had scarcely formed themselves in my mind, when the little figure turned sharply, as if in terror, and uttered a cry of alarm. “Mammy, I am falling!” he called out, as his feet slipped from the bough. I had already made a spring from the carriage, with the sunset dazzling my eyes, when an old negro woman emerged swiftly from the underbrush by the fence, and caught the child in her arms. In that instant of terror, while my eyes were still filled with the sunset, I observed only that the woman was tall and straight like an Indian, and that her face, framed in a red turban, was as brown and wrinkled as a November leaf. Then, as she placed the child on his feet, I saw that her features were irradiated, by a passion of tenderness which gave it a strange glow like the burning light of the sunset. “You saved his life!” I started to cry; but before I could utter the words she vanished into the shadow of the mulberry tree, and left the boy standing alone in the road. “You might have been killed,”! said sternly as I reached him, for I was still trembling from the fright he had given me. The boy looked up with a strange elfin glee—there is no other word for it—in his face. “I knew Mammy would catch me,” he responded defiantly.