Subject:  MSR The Deliverance; A Romance o
Author:  Ellen Glasgow
Uploaded By:  HOST Comp Joots
Date:  8/24/2002

File:  The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields.lit (406526 bytes) 
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Equipment:  Windows computer or Pocket PC
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Keywords:  The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields, Fiction

CHAPTER I. The Man in the Field

When the Susquehanna stage came to the daily halt beneath the
blasted pine at the cross-roads, an elderly man, wearing a
flapping frock coat and a soft slouch hat, stepped gingerly over
one of the muddy wheels, and threw a doubtful glance across the
level tobacco fields, where the young plants were drooping in the
June sunshine.

"So this is my way, is it?" he asked, with a jerk of his thumb
toward a cloud of blue-and-yellow butterflies drifting over a
shining puddle--"five miles as the crow flies, and through a
bog?"

For a moment he hung suspended above the encrusted axle, peering with blinking pale-gray eyes over a pair of gold-rimmed
spectacles. In his appearance there was the hint of a scholarly
intention unfulfilled, and his dress, despite its general
carelessness, bespoke a different standard of taste from that of
the isolated dwellers in the surrounding fields. A casual
observer might have classified him as one of the Virginian
landowners impoverished by the war; in reality, he was a
successful lawyer in a neighbouring town, who, amid the overthrow
of the slaveholding gentry some twenty years before, had risen
into a provincial prominence.