floor.  We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger.  Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice.  Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on.  The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks.  Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.  He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far enough apart.  I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and wondered-at friend.  Once and once again, and yet again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.

XXV.

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine.  Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one.  The last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife’s father when they were first married, and been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use.  Its springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor, when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward.  ‘Go Down, Daniel’, was one in which I can hear his quavering tenor now.  He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud.  No one could read ‘Uncle Remus’ like him; his voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales.  I remember especially his rapture with Mr. Cable’s ‘Old Creole Days,’ and the thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper’s brother when the city’s survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage where the leper lived in hiding:  “Strit must not pass!”