Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/367

 manhood Peter had been a woodchopper; but he had one day had his leg broken by the limb of a falling tree, and after wards, out of consideration for his limp, had been made super visor of the woodpile, gardener, and a sort of nondescript servitor of his master's luxurious needs. Nay, in larger and deeper characters must his history be writ, he having been, in days gone by, one of those ministers of the gospel whom conscientious Kentucky masters often urged to the exercise of spiritual functions in behalf of their benighted people"]

About two years after the close of the war, therefore, the colonel and Peter were to be found in the city, ready to turn over a new leaf in the volumes of their lives, which already had an old-fashioned binding, a somewhat musty odor, and but few written leaves remaining.

After a long, dry summer you may have seen two gnarled old apple trees, that stood with interlocked arms on the western slope of some quiet hillside, make a melancholy show of blooming out again in the autumn of the year and dallying with the idle buds that mock their sapless branches. Much the same was the belated, fruitless efflorescence of the colonel and Peter.

The colonel had no business habits, no political ambition, no wish to grow richer. He was too old for society, and without near family ties. For some time he wandered through the streets like one lost,—sick with yearning for the fields and