Nobody called him "Dee" now. The diminutive did not suit the stalwart youth of seventeen who rode beside his sister to-day, and did most of the talking for the first hour. He was tall for his years, and well knit together, with a frank face his sister thought handsome.
"You were disappointed that I didn't go to college," he was saying, "but I was cut out and made up for a farmer, and nothing else. The smell of a ploughed field is the sweetest perfume in the world to me. When I see my crops growing, I feel my soul growing with them. Where will you find anything in town equal to that, now?"
They were on the top of a hill overlooking the fertile river-lands backed by a line of forest. The noble James, full to the brim after the May rains, glittered in the sun, and made a golden rim for the picture.
"We have the 'sweet fields,' the 'living green,' and the 'rolling flood' of the hymn," said Flea, softly. "Our Virginia is a bonnie country. I am thankful that it is 'my ain countree.' Why, there are the roof and chimneys of the old house! I did not know they could be seen from here. How strange it seems that we should be living anywhere else! How much stranger that Miss Emily should be living there!"
"The house is twice as big as it used to be," replied David. "That fellow made it his business forthwith to alter it as much as he could. You can't make him madder than by speaking of it as 'Grigsby's', or, worse yet, the 'overseer's house.' It is 'Broadlawn' now, if you please, and the model place of the neighborhood. But the old name sticks to it, and all the closer because it frets him. I never speak to him. I cut him upon principle. I promised myself over six years ago to thrash him as soon as I got big enough, and I'm on the lookout for an excuse to do it."
"When the time comes, give him a lash or two in my name--there's a dear boy! All the same, he did us a good turn without meaning to. If he had been half decent with us we might have staid in the Old-Field school for years. When it and the Old-Field schoolmaster are things of the past nobody will believe that such abuses existed in a Christian community. I am sorry for the Tayloe children."
"Red-heads, all three of them," said David. "With tempers to match, so I am told. You wouldn't know their mother. She has broken terribly."