es,
it had felt the blight of war and had fallen into desuetude.

I went several times to look at a place that I thought might suit me. It
was a plantation of considerable extent, that had formerly belonged to a
wealthy man by the name of McAdoo. The estate had been for years
involved in litigation between disputing heirs, during which period
shiftless cultivation had well-nigh exhausted the soil. There had been a
vineyard of some extent on the place, but it had not been attended to
since the war, and had lapsed into utter neglect. The vines--here
partly supported by decayed and broken-down trellises, there twining
themselves among the branches of the slender saplings which had sprung
up among them--grew in wild and unpruned luxuriance, and the few
scattered grapes they bore were the undisputed prey of the first comer.
The site was admirably adapted to grape-raising; the soil, with a little
attention, could not have been better; and with the native grape, the
luscious scuppernong, as my main reliance in the beginning, I felt sure
that I could introduce and cultivate successfully a number of other
varieties.

One day I went over with my wife to show her the place. We drove out of
the town over a long wooden bridge that spanned a spreading mill-pond,
passed the long whitewashed fence surrounding the county fair-ground,
and struck into a road so sandy that the horse's feet sank to the
fetlocks. Our route lay partly up hill and partly down, for we were in
the sand-hill county; we drove past cultivated farms, and then by
abandoned fields grown up in scrub-oak and short-leaved pine, and once
or twice through the solemn aisles of the virgin forest, where the tall
pines, well-nigh meeting over the narrow road, shut out the sun, and
wrapped us in cloistral solitude. Once, at a cross-roads, I was in doubt
as to the turn to take, and we sat there waiting ten minutes--we had
already caught some of the native infection of restfulness--for some
human being to come along, who could direct us on our way. At length a
little negro girl appeared, walking straight as an arrow, with a piggin
full of water on her head. After a little patient investigation,
necessary to overcome the child's shyness, we learned what we wished to
know, and at the end of about five miles from the town reached our
destination.

We drove between a pair of decayed gateposts--the gate itself had long
since disappeared--and up a straight sandy lane, between two li