I may remark, here, that before the late war it was very gratifying to a middle-aged negro to be thought old. There was on every farm a considerable proportion of the ladies and gentlemen of color who had voted themselves too old or too infirm to labor. Their diseases,—they were all diseased,—while masking their malignity behind such empirical euphemisms as rheumatiz or misery in de chist, baffled all diagnosis, and were invariably incurable; for who can minister to a mind diseased with that most obstinate of ailments, an aversion, to wit, to putting in movement the muscles of one’s own body? There was, so to speak, an _Hôpital des Invalides_ on every farm; and on my grandfather’s the _emeriti_ and _emeritæ_ were in strong force. And truly it was a pleasant sight, provided you were not a political economist or a philanthropist, to walk among the cabins, on a bright autumn afternoon, and see the good souls sitting, sunning themselves, and hear the serene murmur of their prattle, broken, ever and anon, by some mellow burst of careless laughter. It was tranquillity such as this, I fancy, that Homer must have observed in the old men of his day. Don’t you remember when there was a truce, and Priam was standing upon the battlements,—what book was it?—but no matter,—and he sent for Helen to come and point out to him the various Greek heroes who stood beneath the walls; and how she had to pass by a knot of ancient men, and how she amazed them by her beauty? The days of toil and sweat and wounds, for them, at least, were past; and they, too, had come to catch, from the turrets, a glimpse of wide-ruling Agamemnon and Ulysses of many wiles; of the brawn of Ajax; and of Diomede, equal to the immortal gods. And there they sat, hobnobbing and a-twittering—so the master says—low and sweet as so many cicadas—let us say katydids—from greenwood tree. “No wonder,” they chirped, “the Greeks and Trojans” (_they_ were no longer either Greeks or Trojans,—they were aged men, merely) “have ceaselessly contended, for now nearly ten years, about her,—for she is divinely beautiful!” I think it must have been my childhood’s experiences of plantation life that caused me to be so profoundly touched by this masterly passage; for hardly elsewhere, in this grimly struggling world of ours, could just such scenes have been witnessed. Just think of it, for a moment! Here, throughout Virginia, there were, in those days, on every farm, three or four, or a dozen, or a score of servants, who had rested from their labors at an age when one may say the struggle glows fiercest with the European races. A roof was over their heads, a bright fire crackled on their hearths. Their food, if plain, was abundant. And there was not a possibility that these things should ever fail them. No wonder they used to rival the ἄσβεστος γέλως that burst from the ever-serene gods, when lame Vulcan, with his ungainly hobble, went to and fro among them, officiously passing the nectar.