"Look, gamma," she said gleefully; "look!" And she, lifting her face, said gently:
"Yes, dear; gamma is looking." Mary's face was quickly averted; the hands of the colonel tightened upon the hand he held.
The Duchess had learned to sing "Rockaby Baby" and now she lifted her thin, piping voice, the player readily following, and sang sweetly all the verses she could remember. Mary took her in her arms when tired, and Edward let the strains run on slower and softer. The eyes of the little one drooped wearily, and then as the player, his gaze fixed upon the little scene, drifted away into "Home, Sweet Home," they closed in sleep. The blind woman still sat with her hand in her husband's, his head bent forward until his forehead rested upon it.
CHAPTER XXX.
THE RAINBOW IN THE MIST.
Mary had lighted his room and handed him the lamp; "sweet sleep and pleasant dreams," she had said, gravely bowing to him as she withdrew—a family custom, as he had afterward learned. But the sleep was not sweet nor the dreams pleasant. Excited and disturbed he dozed away the hours and was glad when the plantation bell rang its early summons. He dressed and made his way to the veranda, whence he wandered over the flower garden, intercepting the colonel, who was about to take his morning look about. Courteously leaving his horse at the gate that gentleman went on foot with him. It was Edward's first experience on a plantation and he viewed with lively interest the beginning of the day's labor. Cotton was opening and numbers of negroes, old and young, were assembling with baskets and sacks or moving out with a show of industry, for, as it was explained to him, it is easy to get them early started in cotton-picking time, as the work is done by the hundred pounds and the morning dew counts for a great deal. "Many people deduct for that," said Montjoy, "but I prefer not to. Lazy and trifling as he is, the negro is but poorly paid."
"But," said Edward, laughing, "you do not sell the dew, I suppose?"
"No. Generally it evaporates, but if it does not the warehouse deducts for it."
"I noticed at one place on the way south that the people were using wheel implements, do you not find them profitable?" The colonel pointed to a shed under which were a number of cultivators, revolving plows, mowing machines and a dirt turner. "I do not, the negro cannot keep awake on the cultivator and the points get into the furrows and so throw out the cotton and corn that they were supposed to cultivate. Somehow they never could learn to use the levers at the right place, with the revolving plow, and they wear its axle off. They did no better with the mower; they seemed to have an idea that it would cut anything from blades of grass up to a pine stump, and it wouldn't."