Old Dan, learning that we were not pleased with our camping-place, invited us to pitch our tents under some trees near his cabin. And for one delightful month of the southern summer we brought into his life the strange sensation of voices fresh from the world he had discarded. The unwonted influence unlocked his memories and sent his mind back to dwell among the almost forgotten years when he, too, was of the world and delighted in it.
We soon fell into the habit of sociability. Every evening he would come down to our camp, usually bringing his violin, and sit with us for hours at our camp fire. His cats--he had near a dozen of them--came trailing after him, and his two dogs trotted by his side. Two or three of the cats sprang into his lap as soon as he sat down, and the rest snarled at the dogs for appropriating the choice positions nearest him, and then disposed themselves in an outer row. The stable inclosure was only a few rods distant, and the three burros it contained, as soon as they heard his voice, ranged themselves in a solemn row at the nearest point, looking as wise and mysterious as so many sphinxes.
Sometimes he played for us, with unexpected skill and feeling, on his violin. As the days went by and our acquaintance grew more intimate, he gradually fell back into memories of the past and turned over for us, now and then, the pages of his life's history. But all these bits, heard at many different times, and some things which were told me afterwards by men who had known him in other years and places, I have gathered into one continuous narrative. For in my memory they are all fused together, as if he had told us the whole of his story in one evening--one special evening, of which remembrance is most vivid.
The moon was at its half, and showered down just enough of its silver light to bring out sharply the darkling woods on the hill beyond the little stream and to make his cabin under the trees, off in the opposite direction, take on strange shapes, while it cut out, sharp and distinct against the background of light, the silhouettes of the solemn and unmoving burros, standing in a row behind the fence. Our camp fire blazed and crackled and the crimson and orange flames mounted high in the air and showed our little party, sitting or half lying about it on blankets. Old Dan, sitting on a great chunk of wood, his lap full of cats, his violin beside him, and his usual bodyguard of cats and dogs around him, went far back into his youth and let us know--what probably he had told no other being since he broke those ties--why he left the home, the heritage, and the name of his ancestors.