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But, when the sun is low, and the shadows creep out, when the old inn blinks drowsy eyes at the cottages, and they blink back drowsily at the inn, like the old friends they are; when distant cows low at gates and fences; when sheep-bells tinkle faintly; when the weary toiler, seated sideways on his weary horse, fares, homewards, nodding sleepily with every plodding hoof-fall, but rousing to give one a drowsy "good night," then who can resist the somnolent charm of the place, save only the "Bull" himself, snorting down in lofty contempt as rolling of eye, as curly of horn, as stiff as to tail as any indignant bull ever was, or shall be.
I shall always recall my journey from White Oak to Harrison's Bar, as marked by constantly increasing beauties of scenery, and terrors of event. At every hoof-fall I was leaving the low, boggy, sparsely settled Chickahominy region, for the high farm-lands of the James.
Not a blade of grass, or a leaf of a shrub, was to be seen on all the steep slope, or rather precipice, for there was very little slope about it; nothing but grey loose shingle, which the first hoof-fall of the leading horse invariably sent slipping and sliding, in a perfect avalanche of rubble, down into the soft bright green morass beneath.
Every hoof-fall brought him closer to the cannon, and the sound had become familiar when he reached the scene. At four o'clock, the musketry was close and effective beyond anything I had known, and now and then I could see, from secure places, the spurts of white cannon-smoke far up the side of the mountain.
The erection of hotels in close proximity to railroad tracks, or upon the main thoroughfares of cities where stone or asphalt pavements resound to every hoof-fall, and where street cars go whirring and clanging by all night long, is something more than an anachronism; it is a fiendish disregard of human comfort.
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