Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/380

362 childlike, unspoiled, open face. To the day of his death, as is apt to be true of those who have lived pure lives but never married, he had a boyish strain in him, a softness of nature, showing itself even now in the gentle expression of his mouth. His brown eyes had in them the same boyish look when, just as he was falling asleep, he scarcely opened them to say, "Pray, Peter."

Peter, on his knees, and looking across the colonel's face towards the open door, through which the rays of the rising sun streamed in upon his hoary head, prayed while the colonel fell asleep, adding a few words for himself now left alone.

Several hours later memory led the colonel back again through the dim gateway of the past, and out of that gateway his spirit finally took flight into the future.

Peter lingered a year. The place went to the colonel's sister, but he was allowed to remain in his quarters. With much thinking of the past, his mind fell into a lightness and a weakness. Sometimes he would be heard crooning the burden of old hymns, or sometimes seen sitting beside the old brass-nailed trunk, fumbling with the spelling-book and the Pilgrim's Progress. Often too he walked out to the cemetery on the edge of the town, and each time could hardly find the colonel's grave amidst the multitude of the dead. One gusty day in spring, the Scotch sexton, busy with the blades of blue grass springing from the animated mold, saw his familiar figure standing motionless beside the colonel's resting place. He had taken off his hat—one of the colonel's last bequests—and laid it on the colonel's headstone. On his body he wore a strange coat of faded blue, patched and weather-stained and so moth-eaten that parts of the curious tails had dropped entirely away. In one hand he held an open Bible, and on a much-soiled page he was pointing with his finger to the following words: "I would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep."