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neither,” Simon disclaimed. “Section han’ seed ’im jump off de train and tole me——”
    “You damn fool nigger!” Miss Jenny stormed. “And you went and blurted a fool thing like that to Bayard? Haven’t you got any more sense than that?”
    “Section han’ seed ’im,” Simon repeated stubbornly. “I reckon he knowed Mist’ Bayard when he seed ’im.”
    “Well, where is he, then?”
    “He mought have gone out to de graveyard,” Simon suggested.
    “Drive on!”
    Miss Jenny found her nephew with two bird-dogs in his office. The room was lined with bookcases containing rows of heavy legal tomes bound in dun calf and emanating an atmosphere of dusty and undisturbed meditation, and a miscellany of fiction of the historical-romantic school (all Dumas was there, and the steady progression of the volumes now constituted Bayard’s entire reading, and one volume lay always on the night-table beside his bed) and a collection of indiscriminate objects—small packets of seed, old rusted spurs and bits and harness buckles, brochures on animal and vegetable diseases, ornate tobacco containers which people had given him on various occasions and anniversaries and which he had never used, inexplicable bits of rock and desiccated roots and grain pods—all collected one at a time and for reasons which had long since escaped his memory, yet preserved just the same. The room contained an enormous closet with a padlocked door, and a big table littered with yet more casual objects, and a locked roll-top desk (keys and locks were anobsession with him) and a sofa and three big leather chairs. This room was always referred to as the office, and Bayard now sat here with his hat on and still in his riding boots, transferring bourbon whisky from a small rotund keg to a silver stoppered decanter while the two dogs watched him with majestic gravity.
    One of the dogs was quite old and nearly blind. It spent most of the day lying in the sun in the back yard, or during the hot summer days, in the cool dusty obscurity beneath the kitchen. But toward the middle of the afternoon it went around to the front and waited there quietly and gravely until the carriage came up the drive, and when Bayard had descended and entered the house it returned to the back and waited again until Isom led the mare up and Bayard came out and mounted. Then together they spent the afternoon going quietly and unhurriedly about the meadows and fields and woods in their seasonal mutations—the man on his horse and the ticked setter gravely beside him, while the descending evening of their lives drew toward its peaceful close upon the kind land that had bred them both. The young dog was not yet two years old; hisnet was too hasty for the sedateness of their society overlong, and though at times he set forth with them or came quartering up, splashed and eager, from somewhere to join them in midfield, it was not for long and soon he must dash away with his tongue flapping and the tense delicate feathering of his tail in pursuit of the maddening elusive smells with which the world surrounded him and tempted him from every thicket and copse and ravine.
    Bayard’s boots were wet to the tops and the soles were caked with mud, and he bent with intense preoccupation above his keg and bottle under the sober curiosity of the dogs. The keg was propped bung-upward in a second chair and he was siphoning the rich brown liquor delicately into thedecanter by means of a rubber tube. Miss Jenny entered with her black bonnet still perched on the exact top of her trim white head, and the dogs looked up at her, the older with grave dignity, the younger one more quickly, tapping his tail on the floor with fawning diffidence. But Bayard did not raise his head. Miss Jenny closed the door and stared coldly at his boots.
    “Your feet are wet,” she stated. Still he didn’t look up, but held the tube delicately in the bottle-neck, while the liquor mounted steadily in the decanter. At