He was a man of action.
The sudden vision which met his wandering gaze, the donkey calmly
chewing scrub buds, with the green juice already oozing from the
corners of his frothy mouth, acted upon him like magic. He was, after
all, only human, and when he got hands upon a piece of brush he
thrashed the poor beast until it seemed as though even its already
half-tanned hide would be eternally ruined. Thoroughly exhausted at
last, he wearily straddled his saddle, and with his chin upon his
breast resumed the early morning tenor of his way.
II
"Good-mornin', sir."
Elder Brown leaned over the little pine picket which divided the
bookkeepers' department of a Macon warehouse from the room in general,
and surveyed the well-dressed back of a gentleman who was busily
figuring at a desk within. The apartment was carpetless, and the dust
of a decade lay deep on the old books, shelves, and the familiar
advertisements of guano and fertilizers which decorated the room. An
old stove, rusty with the nicotine contributed by farmers during the
previous season while waiting by its glowing sides for their cotton to
be sold, stood straight up in a bed of sand, and festoons of cobwebs
clung to the upper sashes of the murky windows.
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