The Colonel's Dream
Charles W. Chesnutt
Language: English
Pages: 136
ISBN: 1515345424
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Two gentlemen were seated, one March morning in 189—, in the private office of French and Company, Limited, on lower Broadway. Mr. Kirby, the junior partner—a man of thirty-five, with brown hair and mustache, clean-cut, handsome features, and an alert manner, was smoking cigarettes almost as fast as he could roll them, and at the same time watching the electric clock upon the wall and getting up now and then to stride restlessly back and forth across the room.
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dinner in low-cut bodices with short sleeves, and was evening dress always required at the theatre? Did the old Knickerbocker families recognise the Vanderbilts? Were the Rockefellers anything at all socially? Did he know Ward McAllister, at that period the Beau Brummel of the metropolitan smart set? Was Fifth Avenue losing its pre-eminence? On what days of the week was the Art Museum free to the public? What was the fare to New York, and the best quarter of the city in which to inquire for a
sworn.” Haines swore that the prisoner had resisted arrest, and had only been captured by the display of a loaded revolver. The prisoner was convicted and fined twenty-five dollars and costs for this second offense. The third charge, for disorderly conduct in prison, was quickly disposed of, and a fine of twenty-five dollars and costs levied. “You may consider yo’self lucky,” said the magistrate, “that Mr. Haines didn’t prefer a mo’ serious charge against you. Many a nigger has gone to the
headstones straightened up. But, guided by a sense of fitness, and having before him the awful example for which Fetters was responsible, the colonel had added no gaudy monument nor made any alterations which would disturb the quiet beauty of the spot or its harmony with the surroundings. In the Northern cemetery where his young wife was buried, he had erected to her memory a stately mausoleum, in keeping with similar memorials on every hand. But here, in this quiet graveyard, where his ancestors
scaled down to the original plaster. Only the name, which had been written underneath, was illegible, though he could reconstruct with his mind’s eye and the aid of a few shadowy strokes—“Bill Fetters, Sneak”—in angular letters in the printed form. The colonel smiled at this survival of youthful bigotry. Yet even then his instinct had been a healthy one; his boyish characterisation of Fetters, schoolboy, was not an inapt description of Fetters, man— mortgage shark, labour contractor and
false notions in the niggers’ heads. Then he got to meddling with my business, trying to get away a nigger whose time I had bought. He insulted my agent Turner, and came all the way down to Sycamore and tried to bully me into letting the nigger loose, and of course I wouldn’t be bullied. Afterwards, when I offered to let the nigger go, the colonel wouldn’t have it so. I shall always believe he bribed one of my men to get the nigger off, and then turned him loose to run amuck among the white