The fisher's hut beside the shore Seems sleeping with the tide; Singing their low sweet rhyme. ELIZABETH WINSLOW ALLDERDICE. JUDITH A CHRONICLE OF OLD VIRGINIA. BY MARION HARLAND. Author of " Alone," "The Hidden Path. ""Common Sense in the Household," "Eve's Daughters," etc. CHAPTER I. ALL the chimneys of the Summerfield homestead were built on the outside of the house. In a nook formed by the meeting of the outer wall with the parlor chimney, I sat on a certain August afternoon. The turf was soft under my feet; a lush trumpet-creeper ran all over the bricks and thrust tough fingers under the clapboards. I nestled among the leaves and orange-red flowers like an exaggerated June-bug. My frock was dark-blue calico, sprinkled with white dots. A sleeveless, high-necked apron left my arms bare. White home-knit stockings and stout shoes made by the plantation shoemaker covered my nether extremities. The "New York Reader " lay on my lap. It was a volume with stiff sides. The valuable text-book was bound between covers of coarse straw pasteboard. From the blue paper covering these yellow splinters protruded at broken corners and abraded edges. I picked at one mechanically while reading of a boy who had, in defiance of his mother's warning never to taste strange flowers or grasses, made a light lunch upon a “pretty plant with a small white flower." I re The catastrophe never lost its charm for me. cognized for the fortieth time the coming of the creeping horror in reading how," when his mother came to him, she was surprised to see that his mouth was dirty." At this point, I became aware that my Aunt Betsey was telling a story. The back porch ran the whole length of the main building and one wing, and was the family sitting-room all summer long. White jessamine and multiflora roses curtained it, drooping low and thick at the end nearest what I had named my chimney-place.” My Aunt Betsey was the widow of a Presbyterian clergyman, who had died in less than a year after their marriage. The sad event had occurred thirty years prior to the date of my story, but she still wore mourning weeds in obedience to the custom of the day and the inclination of such simple, loving souls. Even young matrons sported caps then. That framing Aunt Betsey's face had a veritable crown, standing up stiff and high, and a border of quilled "footing." Her (Copyright 1883 by M. V. Terhune. All rights reserved.) brown hair, interlined with silver, lay in smooth bands above her forehead. Her eyes were gray, mild and contemplative, and, when she conversed, looked at her auditor over her spectacles. She was knitting a lamb'swool stocking, reeling off the sentences as evenly and naturally as she drew the yarn from the fleecy ball in her lap. She sat in a splint-bottomed, straight-backed chair, cushioned with gay chintz. Her sister and my grandmother, Mrs. Judith Read, the widowed mistress of Summerfield, sat in one exactly like it, and knitted a lamb's-wool sock for one of her sons. Neither touched the back of her chair while she worked. I could never decide whether my grandmother reminded me more of a queen or of a saint. Her portrait, taken at sixty, is that of a stately gentlewoman, with black eyes, clear brunette complexion and high-bred, placid features. The deep black of her gown is relieved by a crimped lawn ruffle running around the neck and down to the belt in front. Her mob-cap is of sheer muslin, set above dark hair and tied under her chin with black "love" ribbons. At her throat is a red rose. She used to explain, in smiling apology for the decoration, that her youngest boy had pinned it there, and begged that it should appear in the picture. I had been too strictly trained in such matters to quote hymns on secular occasions; therefore, I never said aloud the line that forced itself into my mind at family worship and during the long sermons at Mounts Tabor and Hermon, when I fell into affectionate studies of my grandmother's face: "Majestic sweetness sits enthroned." Her near ancestors came of noble Huguenot stock. She had their bright eyes and radiant smile, chastened by sanctified sorrow into infinite gentleness. I never saw her angry, or heard a fretful syllable from her lips; yet she had buried the husband of her youth when the eldest of six children was but fourteen years old, and succeeded to the ownership of a fearfully-encumbered estate. Under her administration the debts had been paid and the plantation judiciously worked until her eldest son was qualified to take charge of it. The porch steps were five oaken beams, eight inches thick, set in an easy slope from floor to ground, polished at the edges, and hollowed in the middle by the feet of five generations of Reads. An arch of trellis-work, thatched with vines, formed a pent-house over the porch entrance. On the top step sat two girls, my Aunt Maria and Miss Virginia Dabney, a city visitor. Below them were seated my Uncle Archie, Mr. Bradley, the Summerfield tutor, and my youngest uncle, Wythe Read, a lad of fifteen. Aunt Betsey was the family story-teller-the licensed and honored receptacle of genealogies and traditions. Her auditors were now, as always, respectful and interested. In this, our day, when every scrap of local and general intelligence is seized upon by professional scribes, held up to the light, shaken thoroughly and scraped into lint for application to the ever-fevered sore of public curiosity, the rôle of the oral raconteur is so unimportant that it is going out of fashion. "Tell ye your children of it, and let your children hot and close, and while we talked Jo pointed out a cloud rising in the west. It was black-a sort of blueblack-and topped with white as it swelled up toward the moon. Jo said it reminded him of a gray-headed negro, and I laughed, although I was always timid in a thunder-storm. The shape was like that of an enormous man pulling himself up to his full height very slowly. When the big, broad shoulders and one arm came in sight Jo called to the others to look at it. They came, one after another, until nearly all the company was gathered about the gate, and two or three went out into the middle of the street to get a better view. The breeze had died down completely, and the sound of the falls in the river was very distinct, as it always is just before a storm. Jo said we might imagine that it was the roar of the giant advancing upon us. "Oh, don't!' said I. I am afraid that is a tempting of Providence.' "I can see his teeth and the white of his eyes,' tell their children, and their children another generation." is a process the simplicity of which moves us to smiles. Yet what a barren flat would be our record of happenings not yet fifty years old but for the elderly women who loved to relate unwritten reminiscences, and the young people who loved to listen on the door-steps and about the hearthstones of our homesteads when newspapers were few and popular histories unknown? "I was in Richmond at the time of Gabriel's insurrection," the dear woman was saying when I lifted my head and hitched my cricket nearer to listen, "on a visit to Cousin Sarah Blair. There was a party at her house that night, and after supper we went out into the garden. I was sitting on a bench in a honeysuckle arbor (Cousin Sarah's flowers and fruit were famous) with Jo Pleasants. He married Lizzy Blair the year afterward. She (Lizzy) was singing Robin Adair' in the parlor. The windows were all open, and we could hear every word. I never hear that song to this day without a queer, creepy feeling up my back and a faintness about my heart; and the smell of honeysuckles on a warm night makes me positively sick. It was very 666 "What, when the ball was o'er, What made my heart so sore?' "When she saw the cloud she seized my arm with a little cry: "What is it? Oh, what does it mean?' "She shook like an aspen leaf, and Jo and I were trying to quiet her when we heard far off the beat of a horse's hoofs dashing along at full speed. "There he comes, Miss Lizzy!' said somebody, thinking to amuse her and turn her attention. "She gave one shriek and went off into hysterics. She was a delicate, nervous little thing, with no constitution at all. She died young, and no wonder! One ran for water and another for hartshorn, and half a dozen rushed up with fans. In the confusion we forgot the horse. I jumped as if I had been shot, when a hoarse voice said in my ear: "You've heard it already, then?' "A man had ridden up to the garden fence and leaned over toward us. He talked strangely, panting between each syllable loud enough for us all to hear him. "Why, Colonel Prosser !' cried Jo Pleasants, 'what is the matter?' He was "Lizzy stopped sobbing, and we stared at him, frightened already by his face and manner. deadly pale, and his eyes glared wildly. "Get the ladies in-doors directly!' he panted in the same odd way. Some of you fellows run to the armory. I've sent my body-servant there ahead of me. Some hurry down to the Capitol and have the barracks bell rung. The negroes are rising all over the county. I left hundreds of them on my plantation. They shot at me as I leaped the garden fence. I met squads of them -all armed on the road. They are marching on the city. There is not a minute to be lost.' 66 Scared as I was, I thought of Job's servants, with their 'I alone am escaped to tell thee.' "While he was speaking the cloud swallowed up the moon at one gulp, as it seemed, and it grew so dark in an instant that we had to grope our way to the house. Cousin Sarah's two grown sons, Walter and Hugh, offered to stay at home to guard us, but she wouldn't hear of it. Tom was fourteen, John twelve, and she said they were able to fire through a window should the house be attacked. There were four guns on the premises, besides the sword and pistols Colonel Blair, her husband, had used in the Revolutionary war. She could pull a trigger as well as a man. Hugh and Walter must be off to the Blues' muster-room and help defend the town. Hugh was a lieutenant in the Richmond Blues, and Walter a private. When the men were gone she called us girls into the parlor and shut the door. "Look here, Elizabeth Scott Blair!' says she-cool and sharp like a mustard-plaster-Go to that piano and begin to sing directly!" "I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that girl cross the room, sit down on the music-stool and run her fingers over the keys. I suppose that, her wits being clean gone for the time, her mother's will just took hold of her-possessed her-and she could do nothing but mind her. Anyhow she began to sing the very song at which she had left off playing not ten minutes before: "What's this dull town to me? "Cousin Sarah was gone from the room for maybe three minutes, and returned, with the boys and the guns, as Lizzy finished the last verse. Now-the Battle of Prague!' she ordered-and as loud as you can make it!' "She gathered the rest of us-ten in all-into a corner and set us to work cleaning and loading the guns, and filling powder-flasks and shot-pouches. I think what made me most calm was her sending me up-stairs for check aprons to keep our frocks clean. The sight |