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 fight not only hopeless but mistaken; and now he was back again amid the scenes that he loved and in the country that was his own—that wild and beautiful Low Country which in the old days had been the domain of the great rice planters, a country of great woods, deep swamps, wide marshes, secret secluded lagoons and many winding rivers.

He had come back to it with a joy that was almost ecstatic, longing for the sight of the gray weather-worn plantation house amid its moss-tapestried live oaks, for the sight and the sound of the happy Low Country black folk scarcely changed by all that had happened since the rattle of musketry and the roar of cannon startled the herons from the rice fields in the '60's; longing for the ample sweep of the river marshes and the grateful silences of the cypress swamps; longing most of all, perhaps, for the companionship of the abundant wild folk of the Low Country woods and waters, the deer and the tall bronze wild turkeys, the gleaming white herons and the fantastic long-shanked wood ibises, the vast fleets of ducks that covered the rice fields in winter, the innumerable hosts of singing birds that came with the spring.

In only one important respect had his long absence from these familiar scenes changed the boy. In the old days he had been an inveterate hunter. He now realized that though he was still a hunter