"He's got 'em! He's got 'em sho, Marse Dan!"
He could see Don's slim white and black figure stepping slowly through the high grass on velvet feet, glancing back to see if his master were coming—the muscles suddenly stiffened, his tail became rigid, and the whole covey of quail were under his nose!
He was a boy again and felt the elemental thrill of man's first work as hunter and fisherman. He looked about him at the bald coldness of the artificial park and a desperate longing surged through his heart to be among his own people again, to live their life and feel their joys and sorrows as his own.
And then the memory of the great tragedy slowly surged back, he pushed the dog aside, rose and hurried on in his search for a new world.
He tried the theatres—saw Booth in his own house on 23d Street play "Hamlet" and Lawrence Barrett "Othello," listened with rapture to the new Italian Grand Opera Company in the Academy of Music—saw a burlesque in the Tammany Theatre on 14th Street, Lester Wallack in "The School for Scandal" at Wallack's Theatre on Broadway at 13th Street, and Tony Pastor in his variety show at his Opera House on the Bowery, and yet returned each night with a dull ache in his heart.
Other men who loved home less perhaps could adjust themselves to new surroundings, but somehow in him this home instinct, this feeling of personal friendliness for neighbor and people, this passion for house and lawn, flowers and trees and shrubs, for fields and rivers and hills, seemed of the very fibre of his inmost life. This vast rushing, roaring, impersonal world, driven by invisible titanic forces, somehow didn't appeal to him. It merely stunned and appalled and confused his mind.
And then without warning the blow fell.
He told himself afterwards that he must have been waiting for it, that some mysterious power of mental telepathy had wired its message without words across the thousand miles that separated him from the old life, and yet the surprise was complete and overwhelming.
He had tried that morning to write. A story was shaping itself in his mind and he felt the impulse to express it. But he was too depressed. He threw his pencil down in disgust and walked to his window facing the little park.
It was a bleak, miserable day in November—the first freezing weather had come during the night and turned a drizzling rain into sleet. The streets were covered with a thin, hard, glistening coat of ice. A coal wagon had stalled in front of the house, a magnificent draught horse had fallen and a brutal driver began to beat him unmercifully.