The sheriff’s hand was on the brass knob of the small pine door at the far end of the lower east room. Behind him, the warm sweet air of the cellar hung thick and still, and the long low table ran the length of the room under the slow breathing of the linen ceiling. He had touched the folded hands of Caradoc Thorn Lathrop, of Mariah Culbreath Lathrop, of the little girl Fontaine, each with the same careful respect, and he had said nothing more aloud. Now he turned the knob, and the door opened to him, and he looked into the small room beyond.

“Hollis. Beauchamp,” he said after a long moment. “There is a desk in here, and there is a bound book on the desk, and there is a lamp burning on the desk. This is the room Mariah’s letter was asking us to come to.

This is the room where the writing is. We will stand in this doorway together, and we will read what is on the desk, and we will not touch any object in this room, and we will not call any names. ”

The small room was a plain square chamber of about eight feet by eight feet, built of the same brick as the lower east room, lit by the single oil lamp of the main parlor that had been carried down in the night and set on a plain pine desk against the right-hand wall. On the desk, in the center, lay a bound book of about fourteen inches in height and ten in width, bound in dark green cloth with a plain brown leather spine, closed with a short piece of plain red silk ribbon marking a place in it.

Beside the book, folded once in Mariah Lathrop’s hand, was a small sheet of blue writing paper, the third of the three sheets she had set out that morning. The sheriff lifted the sheet, read it, folded it back along its crease, and put it on the desk. “The letter says that the bound book on this desk is my husband’s hand,” he said in the same plain voice, “and we are to read the final page of the book, which is marked. We are to read no other page.

We are to carry the book out of this house, and we are to see that it is taken, after whatever official business is to be done, into the hands of the sheriff of Issaquena County and sealed and placed in the vault of the courthouse at Mayersville. And that no man of this county is ever to open the book again. ”

The deputy asked, “Sheriff, will you read the final page? ”

“I will read it in a low voice, and I will read it only once,” the sheriff said.

“I will ask you both now to listen with care, and I will not read it a second time in this house, or in your house, or in my own house, or in any house I am ever in. That is a promise I am making to you now before I open the book. ”

He lifted the book from the center of the desk, placed it flat, and opened it to the page marked by the red ribbon—the final page of the writing, with the facing page blank and the preceding page full to its lower margin with the careful small script of Caradoc Thorn Lathrop. The hand was the same hand the two men had known in a thousand short notes between the two plantations.

The ink was the same brown iron gall ink. The sheriff cleared his throat once, and read. The hand on the page said this:

“I have been visited for a long time by a thing that was in the ground under this house before the ground was mine, and that was patient, and that has waited, and that has come into the plaster of the walls, and that has come into the glass of the windows, and that has come by small degrees into the people in the house. I did not know it at first.

I knew it in the second year after the death of my first wife, when I began to find, in the quiet hours of the morning, that the thing in the ground had learned the small habits of my first wife and had put them on, as a man will put on a coat that is not his, and had worn them in the lower hall at night, and had passed the small habits of my first wife by this wearing onto the walls of the house. “I did not drive it out because I did not then know what it was, and I made my second marriage, and I had my children, and the thing in the ground wore the small habits of my second wife, and the small habits of my children, and the small habits of the people in the quarters as the years went by. I came, in the course of these last three years, to understand the thing, and to understand that it had come under the ground long before any white man had put his foot on this country, and that it would be in the ground long after the last of us had gone from this country, and that it had chosen my house because the house had been built on a particular low rise that was a soft place in the ground, and that the house above the rise was for the thing a shirt that it had learned to wear. “I understood further that the thing wished to leave the house by small degrees through the small habits of the people, and that it would, if I let it, be carried out of the house in the small habits of my people when they went down the river to a sale, and in the small habits of my children when they went up the river to their schooling in Natchez, and in the small habits of my wife when she went down to a visit at her sister’s house, and that it would spread by this means into the country, and that it would be in a hundred houses in ten years and in a thousand houses in twenty.

“I understood further that it had told me these things not because it wished me to prevent them, but because it was proud of them, and wished me as the master of the house to be proud of them with it. I was not proud. I was a long time coming to the plan. I will not set the plan down in these pages, because I will not have it read by any man who has not already seen the lower east room, and I will not have any man who has seen the lower east room think that the plan was anything other than my own plan, which it was.

“The plan is the plan of a man who has come to the understanding that his house is the shirt of the thing in the ground, and that the thing will leave the house over time through the small habits of the people in the house, and that the only way to keep the thing in the ground is to take the house down to the lower east room, which is the one room of the house that is below the rise, and to leave the thing nothing above the lower east room to wear. “I have taken down the house. I have taken down the people. The seventy-three were sent away in April as a kindness before the plan, because the thing would have gone up the river in them if they had stayed, and I would not have the thing on them.

The three house servants were kept because they knew the plan and because they consented to it, and because they went with us into the lower east room on their own feet, which they did. The four children were brought to the lower east room by their mother in the final week with their consent, because the thing had been near them for a long time and because they wanted the small quiet that is in the lower east room, and they laid down on the long low table of their own will, and I will not have any man say otherwise. My wife laid down beside them. I was the last.

I laid down beside them when the writing was done. “I ask that whoever reads this writing understand that the lower east room is the one room of the house that the thing could not learn, because the brick came up from Napoleon and the lime came up from Louisville and the linen came up from Boston and the candles came up from Charleston, and none of these were of this ground. The lower east room is therefore not a shirt the thing can wear, and the lower east room will hold the six of us without the thing being able to come into any one of us, and the six of us in the lower east room will keep the thing in the ground, which was the whole of the plan from the beginning. “I ask that the house above the lower east room be taken down in the ordinary way by careful hands, and that the brick of the lower east room be left where it is, and that the earth of the lower pasture be let back over it, and that the river be let back over the lower pasture, and that no sign of Edgefield be left standing above the ground, and that no man come to the ground again in my name.

And that is my request. ”

The sheriff finished reading, and closed the book, and set it down flat on the desk. The deputy Beauchamp and Mr. Hollis Maybury stood on either side of him in the doorway, and no one spoke.

After a long moment, the sheriff picked the book up again, held it against his chest with both hands, and turned to go back through the lower east room toward the stairs. Mr. Maybury and the deputy followed, passing the long low table where the six lay in the warm sweet air, and they did not touch any of them, and they did not call any of their names, and they came up the stone steps, and the sheriff pushed the small outside door of the north end of the lower terrace open, and the three men stepped out into the clear cold air of the December morning. It was a quarter past eleven.

They came around the north corner of the main house to the broad gravel sweep in front of the house, where the three horses still stood at the long iron rail at the lower step. The deputy was already untying the knot of his gray gelding when the sheriff said, in a plain quiet voice, “Beauchamp, hold your hand. There is a woman at the lower end of the oak avenue. ”

The three men looked.

There, at the lower end of the avenue, standing in the middle of the brown earth in a plain good gray dress of 1853, with a plain black bonnet tied with a black ribbon at the chin and a small cloth bundle in her left hand, stood a small spare dark woman of about sixty-six years, waiting patiently for them to come to her. Mr. Maybury, who had known her for the whole of his twelve years at Oakhart, said quietly, “That is Minerva. That is the seamstress of the house.

”

The sheriff said, “Hollis, mount. We will ride to her slowly, and we will not ask her any question until she asks the first question, and we will not raise our voices to her, and we will not take her up on any of our horses unless she asks it. That is how we will do this. ”

The three men mounted and rode down the oak avenue at a walk, and Minerva waited in the middle of the avenue and did not move.

The horses, as they came down the avenue, were less restive than they had been on the way up. The sheriff later said in private that he took it as the first sign that the air of the avenue was already a little less heavy than it had been in the hour before, and that the lower east room, in the quiet work it had done in the night, had done at least that much. The sheriff dismounted and took off his hat. “Mistress Minerva,” he said, “I am the sheriff of Issaquena County.

I have been in the lower east room. I know what is in it. I know what is in the book we have brought out of it. I know by name every person who was in that room at the hour of six this morning, and I will not ask you any question about any of them.

If you have a thing to say to me, I will listen to it here on this road. If you have no thing to say to me, I will mount again, and I will ride down to the lower end of this avenue with you walking beside my stirrup, and I will see you to your cousin at Grace. That is the way it will be done this morning, if you consent. ”

Minerva looked at the sheriff for a long, slow moment, and she said in a quiet, steady voice, “Sheriff, I will say three things to you now on this road, and I will say no more today.

I will say the rest of what is to be said to the man beside you, Mr. Maybury, when he comes to my cousin’s house at Grace in a week or two weeks, as I would like him to do. I will not say any of it under a Lathrop roof, which is a thing I am done with being under. ”

The sheriff said, “Mistress Minerva, I will listen to the three things.

”

The first thing was this. Minerva said, “Mr. Lathrop was not a bad man, and his wife was not a bad woman, and the four children were not bad children, and the three house servants were not bad servants. I will say that to any judge of this country who asks me, and I will say it to the good Lord when he asks me, and I will say it to you now in this road.

”

The second thing was this. Minerva said, “The thing Mr. Lathrop writes about in his book, the thing he says was in the ground, was in the ground. I will tell you that it was there a long time, and it was patient, and it had learned the house.

If Mr. Lathrop had not done what he did in the lower east room this winter, it would have come up out of the ground in the spring, and it would have come up through the floor of the parlor, and it would have gone with Mariah Lathrop to her sister’s house at Natchez in April, and it would have been in Natchez by May, and in Vicksburg by June, and in Memphis by July, and on the river by August, and in New Orleans by the fall, and in a hundred houses by Christmas. ”

The third thing was this. Minerva said, “Do what Mr.

Lathrop asks in his book. Sheriff, do it fast. Take the main house down. Take it down this winter.

Do not leave a brick of it standing above the lower east room. Let the river over the ground. Do not come back to the ground. Do not let any man come back to the ground.

And when the main house is down, Sheriff, see that the little outside door of the north end of the lower terrace is bolted on the outside, and that the bolt is cut off, and that the brick is laid over the whole of it, and that no man will know in a hundred years where the little door was. That is my three things. I will walk down this avenue now, Sheriff, and I will walk to my cousin’s house at Grace, and I will not look back at the house, and I ask that you ride beside me at the walk, if you will, so that if the horse is restive, it will not come up on me from behind. ”

The sheriff said, “Mistress Minerva, I will ride beside you at the walk.

” He put his left foot in the stirrup and mounted, and the sheriff and Minerva and Mr. Maybury and the deputy Beauchamp went down the oak avenue together at a walk, and they came out of the lower end of the avenue, and they turned south on the river road, and they did not look back. The official business that followed was done quietly, and with a speed that was unusual in the river counties of the lower South in that period. In the private papers of the men who did it, there is a plain acknowledgement that the speed was unusual, and that it was done at the request of the three men who had been in the lower east room on the morning of the twelfth, and the men above them had not pressed.

By the evening of the thirteenth, the sheriff Boone Pettigrew had ridden to Vicksburg and put the bound book of Caradoc Lathrop into the hands of the senior judge of the fourth judicial district, Mr. Pelham Colbreath, a distant cousin of Mariah Lathrop by marriage, who read the final page in the sheriff’s company in his private library with the door locked. When he had finished, he closed the book and set it on his desk, and sat for a long moment with his hand flat on the dark green cloth of the cover. Then he said, in a low voice, “Sheriff, this book will not leave this house tonight, and this book will not go into the vault of the Mayersville courthouse.

This book will go into the private vault of this house, in which it will remain for the rest of my life. After my life, it will be the business of my son to decide what is done with it, and I will see that it is a long time before any man I do not trust sees the pages of this book. ”

The sheriff said, “Judge, that will do. ” And the two men did not speak of the matter again.

By the morning of the fourteenth, the senior judge had written a short private letter to the attorney general of the state at Jackson and sent it by express rider, and received a short private reply by the following noon containing a short authorization under the state seal that he was to take the small set of practical steps that he, in his private judgment, considered necessary for the full performance of the final written request of the late Mr. Caradoc Thorn Lathrop of Issaquena County. By the evening of the fifteenth, a crew of twenty-eight careful workmen hired by the senior judge in his own name through a contractor at Vicksburg came up the river on a chartered steamer and came up the oak avenue at a walk, with a wagon of tools and a wagon of ropes and a long wagon of empty crates, and came onto the broad gravel sweep at a quarter past four in the afternoon. The deputy Beauchamp, who had been left at the house as a lone keeper of the gravel sweep, met them at the lower step and took off his hat.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “no one of you is to go into the small outside door of the north end of the lower terrace. That is the plain order of the senior judge of the fourth judicial district. The little door is going to be bricked over tonight by two of your own number under my personal direction, and the rest of you will not come within fifty yards of the little door while that work is being done. That is the one firm thing I have to say to any of you, and I ask that you remember it.

”

The two workmen who did the bricking of the little outside door that evening, under the direction of the deputy Beauchamp in the fading light of the fifteenth of December in 1858, were two brothers from a brick family at Natchez. They did the work in a plain careful way, and afterward were paid in gold coin in a private envelope through the contractor at Vicksburg, and by the terms of a private agreement signed in the presence of the senior judge in the first week of January 1859, they never set foot in Issaquena County again and never spoke of the work they had done at Edgefield Hall to any member of their own family. No surviving account records that they broke that agreement. The main house of Edgefield Hall came down over the course of the three weeks that followed.

The twenty-eight workmen took the roof off first, slate by slate, and the slate was carried down to the landing at Grace and loaded onto flatboats and shipped down the river to a new church at Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, where it was laid on the new roof in the spring of 1859, and where, as far as the record shows, no further strangeness came of it. They took the shutters off next, and the shutters were carried down to the landing and burned in open fires under the direction of the senior judge, who came up to oversee the burning in person and kept watch until every one of the shutters was ashes. The window glass was wrapped in paper and crated and shipped up the river to a glassworks at Louisville that had agreed in a private arrangement with the senior judge to melt the glass down in a single pour and recast it as plain commercial window glass. The window frames were burned.

The doors were burned. The plaster was carried out in barrows into the lower pasture and buried in a long shallow trench. The brick of the main walls came down one course at a time and was loaded onto a long slow flatboat and shipped down the river for seventy miles below Vicksburg, where it was tipped into the river in deep water at a particular bend the senior judge had chosen for its depth. The brick of the chimneys was tipped into the river at the same bend.

The floor joists were burned in a long low fire in a hollow. The stone of the foundation was buried in a long shallow trench alongside the plaster trench. By the fifth of January in the year 1859, there was no part of the main house of Edgefield Hall standing above the ground. The lower east room, as the senior judge had instructed, had not been touched.

The loose earth was raked level and planted with a thick cover of winter rye, which came up green in the first week of February. In the third week of April 1859, the senior judge, in his own name, by a private purchase of the ground from the executor of the Lathrop estate, which was his own cousin, took title to the lower pasture of Edgefield Hall. In the first week of May, he had the small levee at the river end of the pasture breached by a crew of six, and the slow brown river came quietly in through the breach and spread out over the lower pasture and covered the ground above the lower east room by a foot of water, and then by two feet, and then by three. The river has been over that ground, with one exception, from that day to this.

The exception came in the summer of 1871, a year of extraordinary low water on the lower Mississippi, when the river fell below its usual summer level by some seven feet and the lower pasture of Edgefield lay bare again for the first time in twelve years under the hot sun of a slow dry August. Three boys from Grace, aged between eleven and thirteen, who had been fishing in the receded river channel in the afternoon, wandered up onto the dry pasture and came across, in the dry grass, a single small object that had come up through the earth and been exposed by the long dry summer. They bent over and looked at it and did not touch it, and ran home to tell their fathers. The three fathers rode out to the pasture that evening with a lantern, looked at the small object in the grass, did not touch it, and sent by the morning mail a short note to the law office of Mr.

Hollis Maybury at Vicksburg: “Mr. Maybury, we think a thing has come up at Edgefield that you will want to know about, and we have left it where it is, and we would be grateful if you would come. ”

Mr. Maybury came, in a hired buggy from Vicksburg over the course of a long slow day, and came up to the pasture with the three fathers and the three boys in the late afternoon of the twenty-eighth of August, in his seventy-second year, with his small cane in his right hand and his old silver flask of brandy in his coat pocket.

The fathers and the boys stood at the edge of the pasture and let him walk out into it alone. He came to the small object in the grass and bent his head to look at it, and stood for a long moment. Then he reached down and lifted it in his gloved hand, and turned it in the light. He said in a low voice, “That is a thing I have seen before.

It was in a small white porcelain cup on a small sewing room table in a house that is no longer here. I know whose cup it was, and I will take it with me when I go, and I will put it where it will not come up again. ”

The small object in Mr. Maybury’s gloved hand on that August afternoon was a plain pencil of middle length, sharpened to a careful point, with the small greenish color at the base of the point that comes of a pencil used by its owner to touch the inside of her lower lip while deciding on the next word.

Mr. Maybury put the pencil into the inside pocket of his coat and walked back across the dry pasture. He said, “Gentlemen, I thank you for sending for me. Do not come up on this ground again in a dry year, and tell your boys the same, and tell your boys’ boys the same.

If ever again a dry summer uncovers this pasture, and a small object comes up through the earth, do not touch it, and send me or my son or my grandson a short note by the morning mail. ”

The small sewing pencil of Mariah Culbreath Lathrop went down the river that evening in Mr. Maybury’s coat pocket and was buried by his own hand in a small lead box under a slab of granite in the private family burying ground of the Maybury family at Oakhart, where it has been from that August to this day. No further small object from the lower east room of Edgefield has ever since joined it, and the Maybury descendants believe it is the only thing from that room that has ever come up.

Mr. Hollis Maybury lived for twenty-five more years after that August afternoon. He died in his bed at Oakhart in the second week of November in the year 1896, in his ninety-sixth year, in the company of his daughter and his two grandsons, and the young Vicksburg newspaperman Cain Pettigrew, who had come up by the morning train from Vicksburg two days before to sit at the old man’s bedside. In the three days that followed, in the quiet voice of a man who had been waiting a long time to tell a thing in full, Mr.

Maybury gave him the whole of the account, with the plain careful detail of a man who did not want anyone in the generations that would come after him to make up the detail for themselves. The newspaperman wrote the article in the following three weeks in the back room of the Vicksburg Herald by the yellow light of a single oil lamp that had been his mother’s lamp. He folded the article in three, tied it with a piece of butcher’s twine, put it in the back of his desk, and wrote on the outside in soft pencil: “Do not set ever. ” He left it there for the rest of his working life.

After his death in 1911, his daughter found the article in the back of the desk, did not open it, took it home, and kept it in a cedar box in her attic until her own death in the summer of 1952. After her death, her son opened it in the attic of her small frame house at Vicksburg, read it once slowly in the summer afternoon light, folded it back along its creases, put it back in the cedar box, and took the box down to the Vicksburg Public Library the following week. He placed it in the hands of the senior librarian and said in a low quiet voice, “This is a thing from my grandfather’s desk that I believe should be kept, but that I do not believe should be in a house. ”

The librarian put it in the local history collection.

The article is still there, in a plain archive box in a small room on the third floor of the library, marked in a plain careful hand on the outside: “Pettigrew papers, Edgefield omission, December 1858. Access by written permission of the library’s director. ”

The lower east room of the main house of Edgefield Hall is still there under the water of the river. The brick came up from Napoleon, the lime from Louisville, the linen from Boston, the candles from Charleston.

The six Lathrops are still on the long low table in the warm sweet air of the small lamp of the lower parlor, if any air is left in the room at all, which the senior judge of 1858 did not permit any workman to confirm and which no man living has ever been foolish enough to try to confirm since. The river has been quiet over the ground for 168 years. The three Pettigrew boys of the summer of 1871 are long dead. The granite slab of the Maybury burying ground at Oakhart has sunk about an inch into the soft earth, and the small lead box with the sewing pencil is still under the slab.

At the last careful inspection by the Maybury descendants in the year 2015, the slab had a shallow depression worn into its upper face, of a shape not easy to describe in writing, and which the family does not describe. No one is going to lift the slab, and no one is going to ask them to. The three sheriffs of the neighboring counties who were asked by Caradoc Lathrop in April not to come, and who in two cases did come and in the third case did not, lived out their long lives in the lower South without once setting foot in Issaquena County after the sealing of the ground. The attorney general at Jackson who sent the short reply by express rider died in the summer of the following year of a long illness that had been diagnosed before he ever saw the ground at Edgefield, and his short reply under the state seal was not entered in any index and is not now in any state archive.

It is thought by every historian who has looked for it to have been destroyed by the senior judge in Vicksburg in the first week of January 1859, when he burned a small bundle of correspondence in the fire grate of his library with the sheriff and the deputy standing on either side as witnesses. When the ash was cool, it was gathered up into a small iron casket, taken down to the river in the morning, and tipped into the river at the same deep bend where the brick of the main house had gone. No one in 168 years has gone looking for it, and no one is going to go looking for it. The small Episcopal mission at Grace kept a plain brass oil lamp on the altar from the summer of 1859 onward, given in the private will of the senior judge at Vicksburg, and identified by the parish warden in a short private note as a lamp of the small parlor at Edgefield Hall, which had not gone down the river to be melted at Louisville.

The senior judge had kept it out of the general destruction, cleaned it, and given it to the mission to burn for whatever souls might need a slow, steady light on a winter evening. The lamp burned at that altar from 1859 until the mission closed its doors in the spring of 1922, and after that it was carried in a plain wooden box to the small county museum at Mayersville, where it still is on a shelf in a quiet little back room. Minerva, the seamstress of Edgefield Hall, lived to the age of seventy-nine in the small front room of her cousin’s cottage at Grace, Mississippi, and gave her full testimony to Mr. Hollis Maybury at Oakhart in the first week of January 1859, as she had promised him on the oak avenue.

She never went back to the ground of Edgefield. In the summer of 1871, when the dry year brought the pasture up again, she refused to go out with Mr. Maybury, even to stand at the edge of it, and said to her cousin that evening, “I was in the sewing cabin of that house for twenty-nine and a half years, and I know the ground as well as I know the back of my own hand, and I will not go up on that ground again in a dry year or in a wet year or in any year that the good Lord has yet given us. That is my choice, and I will keep it.

”

She kept it. She died in her cousin’s front room in the first cold week of November in the year 1871, three months after the dry summer and three weeks after Mr. Maybury came down to Grace to tell her that the small sewing pencil of her mistress had come up through the earth and had been taken home to Oakhart and buried under the slab. She listened without any expression except a small quiet nod, and when he was done she said only, “Mr.

Maybury, I am obliged to you. I am much obliged, and I believe I will go now and lie down for a little while. ” She went into the small back room, and she lay down, and she did not get up again, and she died in her sleep in the following week at the age of seventy-nine, in the plain quiet way she had asked for. The seventy-three who went out of Edgefield on the night of the twelfth of April 1858 lived, as has been told, into the long free lives of the free states and the free country to the north.

Their descendants are to this day in numbers in Buxton, Ontario, and Chatham, Ontario, and Alton, Illinois, and Cairo, Illinois, and the small towns of Southwestern Michigan, and in some numbers also, in the generations after the end of the Great War, back in the river country of the lower South—in Vicksburg, in Natchez, in Jackson, in Memphis. Their family Bibles carry the names of Thaddeus and Loveday and Daphne and the other seventy, and the family tellings in some branches carry the story of the covered flatboat in the woods, and the slow quiet work of six and a half years, and the night of the twelfth of April, and the dawn below the mouth of the Yazoo, and the long trip up the river under the stars, and the quiet turning of their lives into the shape they had wanted them to be. Some of the descendants have come back in recent years to stand at the fence of the ruined ground at Edgefield, and have gone away quietly, and have not written about it. They are the one piece of the Edgefield story that is a piece of lasting mercy, and they are the one piece of the story glad to be left standing at the end—out of the deep bend of the river, up on the ground where the brick of the Napoleon kiln and the lime of the Louisville yard and the linen of the Boston mill and the candles of the Charleston chandler cannot keep any part of them, and where their names are still being carried in the slow living voices of their own grandchildren into a country that the thing in the ground of Issaquena County never got to wear.

There are versions of this story better not carried down any further, and the version in the hand of Caradoc Lathrop in the bound green cloth book is enough. The thing in the ground, which may or may not have been a thing in the ground, is by every version held in the lower east room of the main house of Edgefield Hall under the slow brown water of the lower pasture, and has not come up, and has not been in any house in the lower South for 168 years. That is where it is left, and that is where it will be left. The year is 1858.

The county is Issaquena. The river is quiet. The lower east room is quiet. The six on the long low table are quiet.

The thing in the ground is quiet. The lamp in the lower parlor of the lower east room, if any lamp is still burning down there under the slow brown water, has been burning 168 winters tonight, and nobody is coming to tend it, and nobody is coming to open the little outside door of the north end of the lower terrace, which is bricked, and the bricks have been buried, and the earth has been planted, and the river has come up over the planting, and the whole long low thing of what was done in the house of Edgefield in the year 1858 is at rest. As the woman in the gray dress asked, as the man in the dark broadcloth asked, as the three men in the plain cold morning agreed.