“You no find dis country good like yourn, young massa?”

“Yes, Toney, this is a good country, and there is no country more beautiful.  But, uncle, it requires more than a beautiful country to make us happy; we must have with us those we love, and who love us; and the scenes of our childhood—­our fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters who are glad with us and who sorrow with us, and the companions of our school-days, to make us happy.  I am here without any of these—­not a relation within a thousand miles; with no one to care for me or to love me.”  There was something plaintively melancholly in his words and tones.  He looked at Alice, her eyes were swimming in tears and she turned away from his gaze.

“You been mity sick, here, young massa, didn’t Miss Alice be good to you?  Aunt Ann tell me so.  If Miss Alice had not nuss you, you die.”  Alice stepped into the cabin taking with her the basket the little negro had borne, and placing its contents away, came out and handing it to Rose, bid her run home.  “I am coming,” she said as she adjusted her bonnet-strings, “the bugaboos won’t catch you.”

“Yes, Uncle Toney, I am very grateful to Miss Alice.  I shall never forget her.”

How often that word is thoughtlessly spoken?  Never to forget, is a long time to remember.  Our lives are a constant change:  the present drives out the past, and one memory usurps the place of another.  Yet there are some memories which are always green.  These fasten themselves upon us in agony.  The pleasant are evanescent and pass away as a smile, but the bitter live in sighs, recurring eternally.

Both were silent, both were thoughtful.  “Good-by, Uncle Toney,” said Alice.

“May I join you in your walk home, miss?” There was something in the tone of this request, which caused Alice to look up into his face and pause a moment before replying, when she said, very timidly, “If you please, sir.”

The sun was drooping to the horizon and the shadows made giants as thy grew along the sward.  “Farewell, Uncle Toney,” said the gentleman, shaking hands with the old negro.  Alice had walked on.

“O! you needn’t say farewell so sorry, you’ll come back.  I sees him.  You’ll come back.  Eberybody who comes to dis country if he does go way he’s sure to come back, ticlar when he once find putty gall like Miss Alice, ya! ya!” laughed the old man.  “You’ll come back.  I knows it.”

In a few moments he was by the side of Alice.  They lounged lazily along through the beautiful forest a few paces behind Rose, who was too much afraid of bugaboos to allow herself to get far away from her mistress.  There was a chill in the atmosphere and now and then a fitful gust of icy wind from the northwest.  Winter was coming:  these avant-couriers whispered of it; and overhead, swooped high up in the blue, a host of whooping cranes, marching in chase of the sun now cheering the Antarctic just waking from his winter’s sleep.