gift of the traditional fairy
god-mother.

"It's an off-set to the hall-bedroom idea, at any rate," he said to
himself humorously. "It holds out an escape from the noble army of
rent-payers. When my twenty-eight hundred is gone, I could live down
there a landed proprietor, and by the same mark an honorary colonel,
and raise the cabbages I was talking about--eh, Chum?--while you stalk
rabbits. How does that strike you?"

He laughed whimsically. He, John Valiant, of New York, first-nighter at
its theaters, hail-fellow-well-met in its club corridors and welcome
diner at any one of a hundred brilliant glass-and-silver-twinkling
supper-tables, entombed on the wreck of a Virginia plantation, a
would-be country gentleman, on an automobile and next to nothing a year!

He bethought himself of the fallen letter and possessed himself of it
quickly. It lay with the superscription side down. On it was written,
in the same hand which had addressed the other envelope:

_For my son, John Valiant,
When he reaches the age of twenty-five._

That, then, had been written by his father--and he had died nearly
twenty years ago! He broke the seal with a strange feeling as if,
walking in some familiar thoroughfare, he had stumbled on a lichened and
sunken tombstone.

"When you read this, my son, you will have come to man's
estate. It is curious to think that this black, black ink may
be faded to gray and this white, white paper yellowed, just
from lying waiting so long. But strangest of all is to think
that you yourself whose brown head hardly tops this desk, will
be as tall (I hope) as I! How I wonder what you will look like
then! And shall I--the real, real I, I mean--be peering over
your strong broad shoulder as you read? Who knows? Wise men
have dreamed such a thing possible--and I am not a bit wise.

"John, you will not have forgotten that you are a Valiant. But
you are also a Virginian. Will you have discovered this for
yourself? Here is the deed to the land where I and my father,
and his father, and many, many more Valiants before them were
born. Sometime, perhaps, you will know why you are John Valiant
of New York instead of John Valiant of Damory Court. I can not
tell you myself, because it is too true a story, and I have
forgotten how to tell any but fairy tales, where everything
happens right, where the Prince marries the beau