He _was_ a good man,--and the village doctor,--and more than
once afterward put me under obligation. One of his best appreciated
favors was unintended and indirect. I was driving with him through the
hammock, and we passed a bit of swamp. "There are some pretty flowers,"
he exclaimed; "I think I must get them." At the word he jumped out of
the gig, bade me do the same, hitched his horse, a half-broken stallion,
to a sapling, and plunged into the thicket. I strolled elsewhere; and by
and by he came back, a bunch of common blue iris in one hand, and his
shoes and stockings in the other. "They are very pretty," he explained
(he spoke of the flowers), "and it is early for them." After that I had
no doubt of his goodness, and in case of need would certainly have
called him rather than his younger rival at the opposite end of the
village.
When I tired of chasing the grackle, or the shrike had driven him away
(I do not remember now how the matter ended), I started again toward the
old sugar mill. Presently a lone cabin came into sight. The grass-grown
road led straight to it, and stopped at the gate. Two women and a brood
of children stood in the door, and in answer to my inquiry one of the
women (the children had already scampered out of sight) invited me to
enter the yard. "Go round the house," she said, "and you will find a
road that runs right down to the mill."
The mill, as it stands, is not much to look at: some fragments of wall
built of coquina stone, with two or three arched windows and an arched
door, the whole surrounded by a modern plantation of orange-trees, now
almost as much a ruin as the mill itself.
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