house. He
thought that perhaps the vanished plantation life of the old South
might have approximated it. His delight in the fine old Tudor pile,
in its ordered stateliness, its mellowed beauty, pleased his hostess
and won the regard of the rather grumpy gentleman who happened to be
her husband and its owner. To her surprise, he took Peter under his
wing, and showed himself as much interested in this modest guest as
he was ordinarily indifferent to many more important ones. It was
his custom to take what he called a stroll before breakfast--a
matter of a mere eight or ten miles, maybe--and he found to his hand
a young man with walking legs, seeing eyes, and but a modicum of
tongue. He showed Peter that country-side with the thoroughness of a
boy birds'-nesting, as Peter had once showed the Carolina
country-side to Claribel Spring. They went over the venerable house
with the same thoroughness, and Peter sensed the owner's
impersonally personal delight in the stewardship of a priceless
possession. He held it in trust, and he loved it with a quiet
passion that was as much a part of himself as was his English
speech. Every now and then he would pause before some rusty sword,
or maybe a tattered and dusty banner; and although he was of a very
florid complexion, and his nose was even bigger than Peter's, in
such moments there was that in the eye and brow, in the expression
of the firm lips, that made him more than handsome in the young
man's sight. Through him he glimpsed that something silent and large
and fine that is England.

"And we're going," said the nobleman, pausing before the portrait of
a gentleman who had fallen at Marston Moor. "Oh, yes, we are
vanishing. After a while the great breed of English gentlemen will
be as extinct as the dodo. And this house will be turned into a
Dispensary for Dyspeptic Proletarians, or more probably an American
named Cohen will buy it and explain to his guests at dinner just how
much it cost him."

Peter remembered broken and vine-grown chimneys where stately homes
had stood, the extinction of a romantic plantation life, the
vanishing of the gentlemen of the old South, as the Champneys had
vanished. They had taken with them something never to be replaced in
American life, perhaps; but hadn't that vanished something made room
for a something else intrinsically better and sounder, because based
on a larger conception of freedom and justice? The American looked
at the cavalier's haug