d battlements of the Blue
Ridge.

His conductor had laboriously descended and now the complaining gates
swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the
neglected driveway was a riot of turbulent growth: thistle, white-belled
burdock, ragweed and dusty mullein stood waist high.

"Et's er moughty fine ol' place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,"
said Uncle Jefferson. "But Ah reck'n et ain' got none ob de modern
connivances."

But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on
the noble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front
peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast
cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange,
lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed
by the shameful stains of the neglected years.

As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old
acquaintance--as if he had seen those tall white columns before--an
illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape
that belonged to his subconscious self, or that, glimpsed in some
immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a
sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and
shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly
black savage with woolly white hair!

"Wishing-House!" he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting--so
vivid was the illusion--to see a circle of rough huts under the trees
and a multitude of ebony imps dancing in the sunshine. So Virginia had
been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his
childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing
grimalkins! The hidden country which his father's thoughts, sadly
recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the
guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to
him that moment that his father was very near.

Leaving the negro to unload his belongings, he traversed an overgrown
path of mossed gravel, between box-rows frowsled like the manes of lions
gone mad and smothered in an accumulation of matted roots and debris of
rotting foliage, and presently, the bulldog at his heels, found himself
in the rear of the house.

The building, with kitchen, stables and negro quarters behind it, had
been set on the boss of the wooded knoll. Along half its side ran a
wide porch that had once been glass