A brightness came into his face, and he faintly pressed my hand. I slipped my arm beneath him and raised him a little higher to meet his death. He was smiling now, and his mind was not quite clear. “Do you mind, sir,” he asked, “how green and strong and sweet smelled the pines that May day, when we found Virginia, so many years ago?”

“Ay, Diccon,” I answered. “Before we saw the land, the fragrance told us we were near it.”

“I smell it now,” he went on, “and the bloom of the grape, and the May-time flowers. And can you not hear, sir, the whistling and the laughter and the sound of the falling trees, that merry time when Smith made axemen of all our fine gentlemen?”

“Ay, Diccon,” I said.