MARSE CHAN
A TALE OF OLD VIRGINIA
BY
Thomas Nelson Page
Here plot, character, and setting are happily blended. The story is sufficient to move smoothly and interestingly; the characters, both black and white, reveal the Southerner at his best; and the setting not only furnishes an appropriate background for plot and characters, but is significant of the leisure, the isolation, and the pride of the people.
MARSE CHAN[19]
One afternoon, in the autumn of 1872, I was riding leisurely down the sandy road that winds along the top of the water-shed between two of the smaller rivers of eastern Virginia. The road I was travelling, following “the ridge” for miles, had just struck me as most significant of the character of the race whose only avenue of communication with the outside world it had formerly been. Their once splendid mansions, now fast falling to decay, appeared to view from time to time, set back far from the road, in proud seclusion, among groves of oak and hickory, now scarlet and gold with the early frost. Distance was nothing to this people; time was of no consequence to them. They desired but a level path in life, and that they had, though the way was longer, and the outer world strode by them as they dreamed.
I was aroused from my reflections by hearing some one ahead of me calling, “Heah!—heah—whoo-oop, heah!”