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 Dorothy South

Dorothy South

I TWO ENCOUNTERS

IT was a perfect day of the kind that Mr. Lowell has celebrated in song—“a day in June.” It was, moreover, a day glorified even beyond Mr. Lowell’s imagining, by the incomparable climate of south side Virginia.

I

A young man of perhaps seven and twenty, came walking with vigor down the narrow roadway, swinging a stick which he had paused by the wayside to cut. The road ran at this point through a luxuriantly growing woodland, with borders of tangled undergrowth and flowers on either side, and with an orchestra of bird performers all around. The road was a public highway, though it would never have been taken for such in any part of the world except in a south side county of Virginia in the late fifties. It was a narrow track, bearing{12} few traces of any heavier traffic than that of the family carriages in which the gentle, high-born dames and maidens of the time and country were accustomed to make their social rounds.

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There was a gate across the carriage track—a gate constructed in accordance with the requirement of the Virginia law that every gate set up across a public highway should be “easily opened by a man on 

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