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A double column eight miles long of ships, crowded to their utmost capacity with armed men, was advancing under low-trailing banners of black smoke, like a resistless fate. As they neared the war-ships, that had for a month impatiently awaited them, these thundered forth a welcome from their big guns.
But Baron Henry and his followers thought nothing of the beauty of the peaceful day, and heard nothing of the multitudinous sound of the singing birds as, with a confused sound of galloping hoofs, they swept along the highway, leaving behind them a slow-curling, low-trailing cloud of dust.
When in repose there was an expression of weariness on his grey face, and a far- off look in the eyes, like that of one who gazes on a distant prospect shrouded in mist or low-trailing clouds.
Gradually the coast was revealed, then came the low-trailing smoke of ships on blockade as they patrolled wearily before the entrance to Havana Harbor, and after awhile the outlined cathedral spires of the city itself.
On the other side were the boys, in physical characteristics the same and suggesting the same social divisions: at the top the farmer now and then a slave-holder and perhaps of gentle blood who had dropped by the way on the westward march of civilization and had cleared some rich river bottom and a neighboring summit of the mountains, where he sent his sheep and cattle to graze; where a creek opened into this valley some free-settler, whose grandfather had fought at King's Mountain usually of Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but sometimes German or sometimes even Huguenot would have his rude home of logs; under him, and in wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed spur of the mountain above, or in some "deadenin" still higher up and swept by mists and low-trailing clouds, the poor white trash worthless descendants of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might have traced their origin back to the slums of London; hand-to-mouth tenants of the valley-aristocrat, hewers of wood for him in the lowlands and upland guardians of his cattle and sheep.
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