All the doors and windows were open and the night breathed through the house, bearing the pungency of the men's tobacco in faint traces to the breakfast room, and presently the sound of a banjo along with the mellow, barbaric voice of a negro singer, filled the place. There was almost uproarious applause from many manly mouths. Uncle Mono was ending up the feast with his favorite song:
"De raccoon am a cunnin' ting, He rammel in de dahk, Wid nuffin' 'tall fo' to 'stu'b he mind, Tell he yer my 'coon-dog bahk!"
He was a jolly-faced, jet black old fellow, with a great shock of grizzly wool on his head, a comically flexible mouth, and dusky eyes that danced to the rapid time of his music.
It was the merest chance that suggested Uncle Mono and his banjo, but if it had been pre-arranged, as in a play, that his two or three humorous songs and his one pathetic love-ditty should close the evening's festivities, it would have been in accord with the highest art. The almost rude yet wholly fascinating carvings on the time-stained panels of the dining-room, seemed to especially favor the effect of such lyrical savageness and grotesquerie.
The impression upon Moreton's mind was strange, almost weird. When all was over and he was alone in his room, he leaned back in a chair, with his feet thrust out of the open window, and gazed into the soft sky with a haunting sense of how suddenly and far he had been removed from the glare and show and polite tumult of his own world. It was all very fascinating, this isolation and decay, these soft-tongued women, these knightly, half-grave, half-hilarious men, this strain of music from Dahomey.
"A westerly wind and a cloudy sky, Proclaim it a hunting morning,"
Sang some one of the merry sportsmen, as the dogs were loosed in a gently rolling field, where, on one hand, the stiff, straggling rows of dry cotton stalks ran down to the river bank, and on the other a dreary fallow plat, overgrown with yellow sedge and clumps of bushes, spread away to a dense wood. There was, in fact, a gentle breeze from the west, and a thin veil of fleece clouds covered the sky. The morning appeared propitious, every one was in high spirits.
The ladies, in an ample spring wagon, had been driven to an elevated point whence they could have a sweeping view of the grounds to be shot over. A field glass or two had been furnished them, so that distance need not trouble their observations.