"_
The colonel had slackened his pace at the sound of the music, but,
after the first few bars, started forward with quickened footsteps
which he did not relax until little Phil's weight, increasing
momentarily, brought home to him the consciousness that his stride was
too long for the boy's short legs. Phil, who was a thoroughbred, and
would have dropped in his tracks without complaining, was nevertheless
relieved when his father's pace returned to the normal.
Their walk led down a hill, and, very soon, to a wooden bridge which
spanned a creek some twenty feet below. The colonel paused for a
moment beside the railing, and looked up and down the stream. It
seemed narrower and more sluggish than his memory had pictured it.
Above him the water ran between high banks grown thick with underbrush
and over-arching trees; below the bridge, to the right of the creek,
lay an open meadow, and to the left, a few rods away, the ruins of the
old Eureka cotton mill, which in his boyhood had harboured a
flourishing industry, but which had remained, since Sherman's army
laid waste the country, the melancholy ruin the colonel had seen it
last, when twenty-five years or more before, he left Clarendon to seek
a wider career in the outer world. The clear water of the creek
rippled harmoniously down a gentle slope and over the site where the
great dam at the foot had stood, while birds were nesting in the vines
with which kindly nature had sought to cloak the dismantled and
crumbling walls.
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