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The tobacco-roller and his son pitched their camp beneath a gum tree upon the edge of the wood. It was October, and the gum was the colour of blood. Behind it rolled the autumn forest; before it stretched a level of broom-sedge, bright ochre in the light of the setting sun. The road ran across this golden plain, and disappeared in a league-deep wood of pine.

Still that Pied Piper of Hamelin, the everlasting Pan, flutes in the deep hollows, squatted down in the broom-sedge. And still the world is a land of unending summer, of unfading flowers, of undying youthfulness.

Cracks between the logs were daubbed with mud which soon dried. The joists were thrown on top of them and gable ends of the same kind of boards that made the room. Bunks three or four feet wide made in two tiers were at rear end and sides bottomed with small poles, and broom-sedge and oak and pine leaves, with a blanket spread over.

We rode about, bringing them into a bunch, arousing some morose old fellow who slept by himself in a corner of the hill, or a dozen aristocrats who held a bedchamber in some windless cove, or a straying Ishmaelite hidden in a broom-sedge hollow, all displeased with the interruption of their forty winks before the sunrise.

I watched the little groups of muleys strike out through the deep broom-sedge hollows and the narrow bulrush marshes and the low gaps of the good sodded hills, spying this new country, finding where the grass was sweetest and where the water bubbled in the old poplar trough, and what wind-sheltered cove would be warmest to a fellow's belly when he lay sleeping in the sun.

When the wind scattered the heavy smoke, he saw only the broom-sedge and several ridges of poor corn; some of the gaunt stalks blackened and beaten to the ground, some still flaunting their brave tassels beneath the whistling bullets. It was all in sunlight, and the gray smoke swept ceaselessly to and fro over the smiling face of the field.

It was the first week in March which found her seated in the centre of a Pullman car of the Florida Limited of the Atlantic Coast Line. The train had passed Richmond and was sweeping through the desolate broom-sedge fields still furrowed by those mortal trenches around Petersburg.

Standing amid the broom-sedge, Mammy watched them, casting eager, anxious looks upon them, fearing, dreading to see her boy in their midst, a poor, defenseless captive. Finally, as the last horseman disappeared, she heaved a sigh of infinite relief. "Bless de good Lord, dey ain't took de po' chile wid 'em," and so went on her way.

They're coming! Here they are!" The old "worm" fence went down, and as Dan piled up some loose rails before him, a creeping brier tore his fingers until the blood spurted upon his sleeve. Then, kneeling on the ground, he raised his musket and fired at one of the skirmishers advancing briskly through the broom-sedge.

At first he saw only gray smoke and a long sweep of briers and broom-sedge, standing out dimly from an obscurity that was thick as dusk. Then came a clatter near at hand, and a battery swept at a long gallop across the thinned edge of the pines. So close it came that he saw the flashing white eyeballs and the spreading sorrel manes of the horses, and almost felt their hot breath upon his cheek.