That night two horses without saddles came to bring them both to Johnson's Cross-roads, and Levin awoke at Patty Cannon's old residence on the neighboring farm.

He looked out of the small window in the low roof Upon a little garden, where a short, stout, powerfully made woman, barefooted, was taking up some flowers from their beds to put them into boxes of earth.

"Yer, Huldy," exclaimed this woman, "sot 'em all under the glass kivers, honey, so grandmother will have some flowers for her hat next winter. They wouldn't know ole Patty down at Cannon's Ferry ef she didn't come with flowers in her hat."

A mischievous blue-jay was in a large cherry-tree, apparently domesticated there, and he occupied himself mimicking over the woman's head the alternate cries of a little bird in terror and a hawk's scream of victory.

"Shet up, you thief!" spoke the woman, looking up. "Them blue-jays, gal, the niggers is afeard of, and kills 'em, as Ole Nick's eavesdroppers and tale-carriers. That's why I keeps 'em round me. They's better than a watch-dog to bark at strangers, and, caze they steals all their life, I love' em. Blue-jay, by Ged! is ole Pat Cannon's bird."

"Grandma," Hulda said, "I wish you had a large, elegant garden. You love flowers."

"Purty things I always would have," exclaimed the bulldog-bodied woman, with an oath; "bright things I loved when I was a gal, and traded what I had away fur 'em. Direckly I got big, I traded ugly things fur 'em, like niggers. I'd give a shipload of niggers fur an apern full of roses."

"Florida, they say, is beautiful, grandma, and flowers are everywhere there."

"Yes, gal, they says so; but I don't never expect to go thar. Margaretty, your mommy, likes it thar. Delaware's my home; some of 'em hates me yer, and the darned lawyers tries to indict me, but I'll live on the line till they shoves me over it, whar I've been cock of the walk sence I was a gal."

As Hulda, also barefooted, but moulded like the flowers, so that her feet seemed natural as the naked roots, carried the boxes around to the glass beds encircling a chimney - dahlias, autumnal crocuses or saffrons, tri-colored chrysanthemums or gold-flowers, and the orange-colored marigolds - the elder woman, resting on her hoe, smelled the turpentine of a row of tall sunflowers and twisted one off and put it in her wide-brimmed Leghorn hat.

"When I hornpipe it on the tight rope," Levin heard her chuckle, "one of these yer big flowers must die with me."

She disappeared into the peach orchard, which tinted the garden with its pinkish boughs, and Levin improved the chance to look over the cottage and the landscape.

It was a mere farm, level as a floor, part of a larger clearing in the primeval woods, where only fire or age had preyed since man was come; and, although there seemed more land than belonged to this property, no other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long porch forward at the base of that tall, blank, inexpressive roof which seemed suspended like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers; the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the King's road.