The train on which we were to
return did not leave until three-thirty. I looked at my watch. It
was ten-thirty.
"Get something from somebody." My hand made movement toward the men
about us and then in the direction of the shacks and sheds and cabins
of the negroes, scattered at wide intervals apart from the village,
which consisted of a long, rambling street with a white frame church
at one end, a gray one at the other, a court-house in the middle, and
a school-house at its back. "Get a buggy and something you can drive
and let's have a holiday--just by ourselves. What is that house over
there?"
I pointed to a square, old-fashioned red-brick building set well back
from the road and surrounded by great oak-trees, and smaller ones of
birch and maple and spruce and pine, and shrubs of various kinds. It
was Claxon's one redemption. Shading my eyes, I read the tin sign
swinging in the wind from a rod nailed at right angles to a sagging
post at its gateless yard. "Swan Tavern." The name thrilled. I was
no longer a twentieth-century person, but a lady of other days, and
if a coach and four with outriders had appeared I would have stepped
in it with delight.
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