"I do think in my soul that of all the mean things a white man has to do, hauling wood on a hot day like this is the very meanest."The speaker was Silas Morgan-a tall, broad-shouldered man, whose tattered garments and snail-like movements proclaimed him to be the very personification of indolence and shiftlessness.As he spoke, he took off his hat and drew his shirt-sleeve across his dripping forehead, while the lazy old horse, which had pulled the rickety wood-rack up the long, steep hill from the beach, lowered his head, dropped his ears, and fell fast asleep.The man had two alert and wide-awake companions, and they were a brace of finely-bred Gordon setters, which, after beating the bushes on both sides of the road in the vain effort to put up a grouse or start a hare, now came in, and lay down near the wagon.
