observer might have classified him as one of the Virginian
landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a
successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow
of the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen
into a provincial prominence.

His humour met with a slow response from the driver, who sat
playfully flicking at a horsefly on the flank of a tall,
raw-boned sorrel. "Wall, thar's been a sight of rain lately," he
observed, with goodnatured acquiescence, "but I don't reckon the
mud's more'n waist deep, an' if you do happen to git clean down,
thar's Sol Peterkin along to pull you out. Whar're you hidin',
Sol? Why, bless my boots, if he ain't gone fast asleep!"

At this a lean and high-featured matron, encased in the rigidity
of her Sunday bombazine, gave a prim poke with her umbrella in
the ribs of a sparrow-like little man, with a discoloured,
scraggy beard, who nodded in one corner of the long seat.

"I'd wake up if I was you," she remarked in the voice her sex
assumes when virtue lapses into severity.

Starting from his doze, the little man straightened his wiry,
sunburned neck and mechanically raised his hand to wipe away a
thin stream of tobacco juice which trickled from his half-open
mouth.

"Hi!we ain't got here a'ready!" he exclaimed, as he spat
energetically into the mud. "I d'clar if it don't beat all--one
minute we're thar an' the next we're here. It's a movin' world we