So I rode straight to Barry Upper Branch, and a handsome black woman

in a flaunting gown, with a great display of beads, and an orange

silk scarf twisted about her head, came to parley with me, and told

me that both the brothers were away, and added that she thought I

should find them at the tavern.

The tavern was a brick building abounding in sharp slants of roof,

and dimmed in outline by a spreading cloud of new-leaved branches,

and there was one great honey-locust which was a marvel to be

seen, and hummed with bees with a mighty drone as of all the

spinning-wheels in the country, and the sweetness of it blew down

upon one passing under, like a wind of breath. And before the tavern

were tied, stamping and shaking their heads for the early flies,

many fine horses, and among them Parson Downs' and the Barry

brothers', and from within the tavern came the sound of laughter in

discordant shouts, and now and then a snatch of a song. Then a great

hoarse rumble of voice would cap the rest, telling some loose story,

then the laughter would follow--enough, it seemed, to make the roof

shake--and all the time the hum of the bees in the honey-locust

outside went on. Verily at that time in Virginia, with all the

spirit of the people in a ferment of rebellion against the

established order of things, being that same ferment which the

ardour of Nathaniel Bacon had set in motion, and which, so far as

I see now, was the beginning of an epoch of history, there was

nothing after all, no plotting nor counterplotting, no fierce

inveighing against authority, nor reckless carousing on the brinks

of precipices, which could for a second stay the march of the

mightiest force of all--the spring which had returned in its

majesty of victory, for thousands of years, and love which had

come before that.

I tied my horse with the others, with a tight halter, for he was apt

to pick quarrels, having always a theory that such discomforts as

flies or a long weariness of standing were in some fashion to be

laid to the doors of other horses, and indeed made always of his own

kind his special scapegoat of the dispensation of Providence. 'Tis

little I know about that great mystery of the animal creation and

its relation toward the human race, but verily I believe that that

fine horse of mine, from his propensity for kicking and lashing out

from his iron-bound hoofs at whatever luckless steed came within his

reach whenever the world went not to his liking, could not see an

inch beyond the true horizon limit of the horse race, and attributed

all that happened on earth, including man, to the agency of his own

sort. Sure I was, from the backward glance of viciousness which he

cast at the other stamping steeds as soon as I dismounted, that he

concluded with no hesitation they had in some way led me to ride him

thither instead of to his snug berth in the Cavendish stables, with

his eager nose in his feed trough.




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