Go with me,
and keep with me: do you understand?"
"Yes, marster."
When the negro departed, Meshach himself took up the tall, green,
buckled hat, with the stiff, broad, piratical brim. He looked it over
long and hard.
"Vanity, vanity!" he murmured, "vanity and habit! I dare not disown thee
now, because they give thee ridicule, and without thee they would give
me nothing but hate!"
The people around the tavern and court-house saw, with surprise too
great for jeering, the note-shaver go past in a carriage, driven by his
negro, and with two horses! Jack Wonnell took off his shining beaver to
cheer. As the phenomenal team receded, the old cry ran, however, down
the stilly street: "Steeple-top! He's got it on! Meshach's loose!"
The carriage proceeded out the forest road, and soon entered upon the
sandy, pine-slashed region called Hard-scrabble, or Hardship.
Here the roads were sandy as the hummocks and hills in the rear of a sea
beach, and the low, lean pines covered the swells and ridges, while in
occasional level basins, where the stiff clay was exposed, some
forester's unpainted hut sat black and smoking on the slope, without a
window-pane, an ornament, or anything to relieve life from its monotony
and isolation.
But where the rills ran off to the continuous swamps the leafage started
up in splendrous versatility. The maple stood revealed in all its fair,
light harmonies.
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