And though Leonora could shut the windows and gravely explain, then tell a story and divert the moment,--they were so young, so plastic, so trustful,--no ingenuity could find a satisfactory method to account for the anti-climax of the tragedy, when within the hour came the same detail, marching briskly back along the turnpike, with fife and drum playing a waggish tune. The wide, daunted eyes of the children, their paling cheeks, their breathless silence, annotated the lesson in brutality, in the essential heartlessness of the world, except for the tutored graces of a cultivated philanthropy. For a long time one or the other would wake in the night to cry out that she heard the muffled drum,--they were taking the man out to shoot him, kneeling on his coffin,--and again and again would come the plaintive query, "And is nobody, _nobody_ sorry?" The incident passed with the events of the crowded time, but even within the domestic periphery harmony had ceased to reign as of yore. Old Ephraim was a bit sullen, gloomy, did his work with an ill grace, and repudiated all acquaintance with "Brer Rabbit" and "Brer Fox." The soldiers in the neighboring camps--possibly to secure an influence, his alienation from the interest of his quasi-owner, in order to ferret out more of the mystery concerning the Confederate officer, possibly only animated by political fervor, and it may be with a spice of mischief, finding amusement in the old negro's garrulous grotesqueries--had been talking to him of slavery, making the most of his grievances, setting them in order before him, and urging him to rouse himself to the great opportunities of freedom. "I done make up my mind," he said autocratically, one day in the kitchen. "I gwine realize on my forty acres an' a muel!" For this substantial bonanza freedom was supposed to confer on each ex-slave. "Forty acres an' a mule!" the old cook echoed in derisive incredulity and with a scornful black face. "You _done_ realize on de mule--a mule is whut you is, sure! Here's yer mule! An' now you go out an' fotch me a pail of water, else I'll make ye realize on enough good land ter kiver ye! Dat's whut! It'll be six feet--not forty acres,--but it kin do yer job!" He might have made a fractious politician but for this adverse influence, for he had the variant moods of a mercurial nature, and in gloom showed a morose perversity that could have been easily manipulated into a spurious sense of martyrdom, lacking a tutored ratiocination to enable him to discriminate the facts. But despite his failings, his ignorance, the bewildering changes in his surroundings, never a word concerning his young master escaped his lips, never an inadvertent allusion, a disastrous whisper. He scarcely allowed himself a thought, a speculation. "Fust thing I know," he reflected warily, "I'll be talkin' ter myself. They always tole me dat walls had ears!"