Little more than a boy he was." The old fellow passed his seamy hand over his eyes without concealment.

"Peter ain't very bright, sometimes, it seems to me," he added, brokenly; "overlook Bodeffer and Fisbee and me and all of us old husks, and--and--" he gulped suddenly, then finished--"and act the fool and take a boy that's the best we had.
I wish the Almighty would take Peter off the gate; he ain't fit fer it." When the attorney reached the spot where the crowd was thickest, way was made for him.

The old colored man, Xenophon, approached at the same time, leaning on a hickory stick and bent very far over, one hand resting on his hip as if to ease a rusty joint.

The negro's age was an incentive to fable; from his appearance he might have known the prophets, and he wore that hoary look of unearthly wisdom many decades of superstitious experience sometimes give to members of his race.
His face, so tortured with wrinkles that it might have been made of innumerable black threads woven together, was a living mask of the mystery of his blood.

Harkless had once said that Uncle Xenophon had visited heaven before Swedenborg and hell before Dante.