-enclosed, now with panes gone and
broken and putty-crumbling sashes. Below it lay the piteous remnants of
a formal garden, grouped about an oval pool from whose center reared the
slender yellowed shaft of a fountain in whose shallow cup a robin was
taking its rain-water bath. The pool was dry, the tiles that had formed
its floor were prized apart with weeds; ribald wild grape-vines ran
amuck hither and thither; and over all was a drenching-sweet scent of
trailing honeysuckle.

Threading his way among the dank undergrowth of the desolate wilderness,
following the sound of running water, he came suddenly to a little lake
fed from unseen pipes, that spread its lily-padded surface coolly and
invitingly under a clump of elms. Beside it stood a spring-house with a
sadly sagging roof. With a dead branch he probed the water's depth. "Ten
feet and a pebble bottom," he said. The lake's overflow poured in a
musical cascade down between fern-covered rocks, to join, far below, the
stream he had seen from the gateway. Beyond this the ground rose again
to a hill, densely forested and flanked by runnelled slopes of
poverty-stricken broom-sedge as stark and sear as the bad-lands of an
alkali desert. As he gazed, a bird bubbled into a wild song from the
grape-vine tangle behind him, and almost at his feet a rabbit scudded
blithely out of the weeds and darted back.

"Mine!" he said aloud with a rueful pride. "And for general
run-downness, it's up to the advertisement." He looked musingly at the
piteous wreck and ruin, his gaze sweeping down across the bared fields
and unkempt forest. "Mine!" he repeated. "All that, I suppose, for it
has the same earmarks of neglect. Between those cultivated stretches it
looks like a wedge of Sahara gone astray." His gaze returned to the
house. "Yet what a place it must have been in its time!" It had not
sprung into being at the whim of any one man; it had grown mellowly and
deliberately, expressing the multiform life and culture of a stock.
Generation after generation, father and son, had lived there and loved
it, and, ministering to all, it had given to each of itself. The wild
weird beauty was infecting him and the pathos of the desolation caught
at his heart. He went slowly back to where his conductor sat on the
lichened horse-block.

"We's heah," called Uncle Jefferson cheerfully. "Whut we gwineter do
nex', suh? Reck'n Ah bettah go ovah ter Miss Dandridge's place fer er
crowbah. Lawd!" he added, "