Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/375

Rh relations. No one ever saw in their intercourse aught but the finest courtesy, the most delicate consideration. The very tones of their voices in addressing each other were as good as sermons on gentleness, their antiquated playfulness as melodious as the babble of distant water. To be near them was to be exorcised of evil passions. The sun of their day had indeed long since set; but, like twin clouds lifted high and motionless into some far quarter of the gray twilight skies, they were still radiant with the glow of the invisible orb.

Henceforth the colonel's appearances in public were few and regular. He went to church on Sundays, where he sat on the edge of the choir in the center of the building, and sang an ancient bass of his own improvisation to the older hymns, and glanced furtively around to see whether anyone noticed that he could not sing the new ones. At the Sunday-school picnics the committee of arrangements allowed him to carve the mutton, and after dinner to swing the smallest children gently beneath the trees. He was seen on Commencement Day at Morrison Chapel, where he always gave his bouquet to the valedictorian, whose address he preferred to any of the others. In the autumn he might sometimes be noticed sitting high up in the amphitheater at the fair and looking over into the ring where the judges were grouped around the music-stand. Once he had been a judge himself, with a blue ribbon in his buttonhole, while the band played "Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," and "Gentle Annie." The ring seemed full of young men now, and no one thought of offering him the privileges of the grounds. In his day the great feature of the exhibition had been cattle; now everything was turning into a horse show. He was always glad to get home again to Peter, his true yokefellow. For just as two old oxen—one white and one black—that have long toiled under the same yoke will, when turned out to graze at last in the widest pasture, come and put themselves horn to horn and