Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III Six o'clock found Chester in Ovide's bookshop. Had its shelves borne law-books, or had he not needed for law-books all he dared spend, he might have known the surprisingly informed and refined shopman better. Ovide had long been a celebrity. Lately a brief summary of his career had appeared incidentally in a book, a book chiefly about others, white people. "You can't write a Southern book and keep us out," Ovide himself explained. Even as it was, Chester had allowed himself that odd freedom with Landry which Southerners feel safe in under the plate armor of their race distinctions. Receiving his map he asked, as he looked along a shelf or two: "Have you that book that tells of you—as a slave? your master letting you educate yourself; your once refusing your freedom, and your being private secretary to two or three black lieutenant-governors?" "I had a copy," Landry said, "but I've sold it. Where did you hear of it ? From Rene Ducatel, in his antique-shop, whose folks 'tis mostly about ?" "Yes. An antique himself, in spirit, eh? Yet modern enough to praise you highly." "H'mm! but only for the virtues of a slave." Chester smiled round from the shelves: "I noticed that! I'm afraid we white folks, the world over, are prone to do that—with you-all." "Yes, when you speak of us at all." "Ducate1's opposite neighbor," Chester remarked, "is an antique even more interest- ing." "Ah, yes! Castanado is antique only in that art spirit which the tourist trade is every day killing even in Royal Street." "That's the worst decay in this whole decaying quarter," the young man said. "And in all this deluge of trade spirit," Ovide continued, "the best dry land left of it—of that spirit of art—is " "Castanado's shop, I dare say." "Castanado's and three oth...