THE PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN June came to tide-water Virginia with long, warm days and with the odor of many roses.

Day by day the cloudless sunshine visited the land: night by night the large pale stars looked into its waters.

It was a slumberous land, of many creeks and rivers that were wide, slow, and deep, of tobacco fields and lofty, solemn forests, of vague marshes, of white mists, of a haze of heat far and near.

The moon of blossoms was past, and the red men--few in number now--had returned from their hunting, and lay in the shade of the trees in the villages that the English had left them, while the women brought them fish from the weirs, and strawberries from the vines that carpeted every poisoned field or neglected clearing.

The black men toiled amidst the tobacco and the maize; at noontide it was as hot in the fields as in the middle passage, and the voices of those who sang over their work fell to a dull crooning.