I have spent my life in gathering darkness for myself at the
last."
I bent lower over him, and took his hand in mine. "Diccon, my
man," I said.
A brightness came into his face, and he faintly pressed my hand. I
slipped my arm beneath him and raised him a little higher to meet
his death. He was smiling now, and his mind was not quite clear.
"Do you mind, sir," he asked, "how green and strong and sweet
smelled the pines that May day, when we found Virginia, so many
years ago?"
"Ay, Diccon," I answered. "Before we saw the land, the fragance
told us we were near it."
"I smell it now," he went on, "and the bloom of the grape, and the
May-time flowers. And can you not hear, sir, the whistling and the
laughter and the sound of the falling trees, that merry time when
Smith made axemen of all our fine gentlemen?"
"Ay, Diccon," I said. "And the sound of the water that was dashed
down the sleeve of any that were caught in an oath."
He laughed like a little child. "It is well that I was n't a gentleman,
and had not those trees to fell, or I should have been as wet as any
merman. . . . And Pocahontas, the little maid . . . and how blue the
sky was, and how glad we were what time the Patience and
Deliverance came in!"
His voice failed, and for a minute I thought he was gone; but he
had been a strong man, and life slipped not easily from him.
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