addressed to himself. "Dat's w'at dey pays roun' hyuh."

When they reached a large clearing, which Peter pointed out as their
destination, the old man dismounted with considerable agility, and
opened a rickety gate that was held in place by loops of rope.
Evidently the entrance had once possessed some pretensions to
elegance, for the huge hewn posts had originally been faced with
dressed lumber and finished with ornamental capitals, some fragments
of which remained; and the one massive hinge, hanging by a slender
rust-eaten nail, had been wrought into a fantastic shape. As they
drove through the gateway, a green lizard scampered down from the top
of one of the posts, where he had been sunning himself, and a
rattlesnake lying in the path lazily uncoiled his motley brown
length, and sounding his rattle, wriggled slowly off into the rank
grass and weeds that bordered the carriage track.

The house stood well back from the road, amid great oaks and elms and
unpruned evergreens. The lane by which it was approached was partly
overgrown with weeds and grass, from which the mare's fetlocks swept
the dew, yet undried by the morning sun.

The old Dudley "mansion," as it was called, was a large two-story
frame house, built in the colonial style, with a low-pitched roof, and
a broad piazza along the front, running the full length of both
stories and supported by thick round columns, each a solid piece of
pine timber, gray with age and lack of paint, seamed with fissures by
the sun and rain of many years. The roof swayed downward on one side;
the shingles were old and cracked and moss-grown; several of the
second story windows were boarded up, and others filled with sashes
from which most of the glass had disappeared.

About the house, for a space of several rods on each side of it, the
ground was bare of grass and shrubbery, rough and uneven, lying in
little hillocks and hollows, as though recently dug over at haphazard,
or explored by some vagrant drove of hogs. At one side, beyond this
barren area, lay a kitchen garden, enclosed by a paling fence. The
colonel had never thought of young Dudley as being at all energetic,
but so ill-kept a place argued shiftlessness in a marked degree.

When the carriage had drawn up in front of the house, the colonel
became aware of two figures on the long piazza. At one end, in a
massive oaken armchair, sat an old man--seemingly a very old man, for
he was bent and wrinkled, with thin white ha