He was a jolly-faced, jet black old fellow, with a great shock of grizzly wool on his head, a comically flexible mouth, and dusky eyes that danced to the rapid time of his music. It was the merest chance that suggested Uncle Mono and his banjo, but if it had been pre-arranged, as in a play, that his two or three humorous songs and his one pathetic love-ditty should close the evening's festivities, it would have been in accord with the highest art. The almost rude yet wholly fascinating carvings on the time-stained panels of the dining-room, seemed to especially favor the effect of such lyrical savageness and grotesquerie. The impression upon Moreton's mind was strange, almost weird. When all was over and he was alone in his room, he leaned back in a chair, with his feet thrust out of the open window, and gazed into the soft sky with a haunting sense of how suddenly and far he had been removed from the glare and show and polite tumult of his own world. It was all very fascinating, this isolation and decay, these soft-tongued women, these knightly, half-grave, half-hilarious men, this strain of music from Dahomey. CHAPTER VIII. WITH DOG AND GUN. "A westerly wind and a cloudy sky, Proclaim it a hunting morning," Sang some one of the merry sportsmen, as the dogs were loosed in a gently rolling field, where, on one hand, the stiff, straggling rows of dry cotton stalks ran down to the river bank, and on the other a dreary fallow plat, overgrown with yellow sedge and clumps of bushes, spread away to a dense wood. There was, in fact, a gentle breeze from the west, and a thin veil of fleece clouds covered the sky. The morning appeared propitious, every one was in high spirits. The ladies, in an ample spring wagon, had been driven to an elevated point whence they could have a sweeping view of the grounds to be shot over. A field glass or two had been furnished them, so that distance need not trouble their observations. The men, in a long line and distant from each other not less than twenty yards, walked slowly with the dogs running to and fro ahead of them. The morning was balmy and warm, but not hot, with just a hint of dampness in the air. Along the river a low-hanging line of gray fog was slowly fading away. The ladies alighted from the wagon, with the help of the colored driver, and disposed themselves in picturesque attitudes, their broad hats thrown back and the wind fluttering their ribbons. Miss Noble and Miss Crabb were the most interested, the latter making swift notes in a little red book.