From the open door of the bar on this particular October day, there streamed the ruddy blaze of a fire newly kindled from knots of resinous pine.  Against this pleasant background might be discerned now and then the shapeless silhouette of Betsey Bottom, the innkeeper, a soft and capable soul, who, in attaching William Ming some ten years before, had successfully extinguished his identity without materially impairing her own.  Bottom’s Ordinary had always been ruled by a woman, and it would continue to be so, please God, however loudly a mere Ming might protest to the contrary.  In the eyes of her neighbours, a female, right or wrong, was always a female, and this obvious fact, beyond and above any natural two-sided jars of wedlock, sufficed in itself to establish Mrs. Ming as a conjugal martyr.  Being an amiable body—­peaceably disposed to every living creature, with the exception of William—­she had hastened to the door to reprimand him for some trivial neglect of the grey mule, when her glance lighted upon the stranger, who had come a few minutes earlier by the Applegate road.  As he was a fine looking man of full habit and some thirty years, her eyes lingered an instant on his face before she turned with the news to her slatternly negro maid who was sousing the floor with a bucket of soapsuds.

“Thar’s nobody on earth out thar but young Mr. Jonathan Gay come back to Jordan’s Journey,” she said.  “I declar I’d know a Gay by his eyes if I war to meet him in so unlikely a place as Kingdom Come.  He’s talkin’ to old Adam Doolittle now,” she added, for the information of the maid, who, being of a curious habit of mind, had raised herself on her knees and was craning her neck toward the door, “I can see his lips movin’, but he speaks so low I can’t make out what he says.”

“Lemme git dar a minute, Miss Betsey, I’se got moughty sharp years, I is.”

“They’re no sharper than mine, I reckon, and I couldn’t hear if I stood an’ listened forever.  It’s about the road most likely, for I see old Adam a-pintin’.”

For a minute after dismounting the stranger looked dubiously at the mottled face of the tavern.  On his head the sunlight shone through the boughs of a giant mulberry tree near the well, and beyond this the Virginian forest, brilliant with its autumnal colours of red and copper, stretched to the village of Applegate, some ten or twelve miles to the north.

Starting southward from the cross-roads, the character of the country underwent so sudden a transformation that it looked as if man, having contended here unsuccessfully with nature, had signed an ignominious truce beneath the crumbling gateposts of the turnpike.  Passing beyond them a few steps out of the forest, one found a low hill, on which the reaped corn stood in stacks like weapons of a vanished army, while across the sunken road, the abandoned fields, overgrown with broomsedge and life-everlasting, spread for several miles between “worm fences” which were half buried in brushwood.  To the eyes of the stranger, fresh from the trim landscapes of England, there was an aspect of desolation in the neglected roads, in the deserted fields, and in the dim grey marshes that showed beyond the low banks of the river.