It was an old farmhouse, now devoid of paint; and the path to it had once been a well-kept gravel walk, lined with cedars; but the box-plants, having felt no pruning shears for years, almost filled, with their fantastically jagged boughs, the narrow path, while the cedars tossed about their broken and dead limbs. The tall, square pillars in the house, from dado above to where they rested in the brick base below, showed the naked wood, untouched so long by paint that it had grown furzy from rain and snow, and splintery from sun and heat. Its green shutters hung, some of them, on one hinge; and those which could be closed, were shut up close and sombre under the casements. A half dozen hounds came baying and barking around him. As Jud proceeded, others poured out from under the house. All were ribby, and half starved. Without a moment's hesitation they promptly covered Bonaparte, much to the delight of that genius. Indeed, from the half-satisfied, half malignant snarl which lit up his face as they piled rashly and brainlessly on him, Jud took it that Bonaparte had trotted all these miles just to breakfast on this remnant of hound on the half-shell. In a few minutes Bonaparte's terrible, flashing teeth had them flying in every direction. Jud promptly cuffed him back to the gate and bade him wait there. On the front portico, his chair half-tilted back, his trousers in his boot legs, and his feet on the balustrade rim, the uprights of which were knocked out here and there, like broken teeth in a comb,--sat a man in a slouch hat, smoking a cob pipe. He was in his shirt sleeves. His face was flushed and red; his eyes were watery, bleared. His head was fine and long--his nose and chin seemed to meet in a sharp point. His face showed that form of despair so common in those whom whiskey has helped to degenerate. He did not smile--he scowled continuously, and his voice had been imprecatory so long that it whined in the same falsetto twang as one of his hounds. Jud stepped forward and bowed obsequiously. "How are you to-day, Majah, sah?" he asked while his puckered and wrinkled face tried to smile. Jud was chameleon. Long experience had taught him to drop instinctively into the mannerism--even the dialect--of those he hoped to cajole. With the well-bred he could speak glibly, and had airs himself. With the illiterate and the low-bred, he could out-Caliban the herd of them. The man did not take the pipe out of his mouth. He did not even turn his head. Only his two bleared eyes shot sidewise down to the ground, where ten feet below him stood the employment agent of the mills, smiling, smirking, and doing his best to spell out on the signboard of his unscrupulous face the fact that he came in peace and good will.