l House in the seventies--boys still
continuing to be boyish--and there, a decade later, his wife died,
childless.

McClintock disposed of his takings unobserved, holding Mitchell House
only, and slipped away to New York or elsewhere. The rents of Mitchell
House were absorbed by a shadowy, almost mythical agent, whose name
you always forgot until you hunted up the spidery signature on the
receipts given by the bank for your rent money.

Except for a curious circumstance connected with Mitchell House,
McClintock had been quite forgotten of Vesper and Abingdon. The great
house was much in demand as a summer residence; those old oak-walled
rooms were spacious and comfortable, if not artistic; the house was
admirably kept up. It was in the most desirable neighborhood; there was
fishing and boating; the situation was "sightly." We borrow the last word
from the hill folk, the presentee landlords; the producers, or, to put
it quite bluntly, the workers.

As the years slipped by, it crept into common knowledge that not every
one could obtain a lease of Mitchell House. Applicants, Vesperian or
"foreigners," were kept waiting; almost as if the invisible agent were
examining into their eligibility. And it began to be observed that
leaseholders were invariably light, frivolous, pleasure-loving people,
such as kept the big house crowded with youth and folly, to company youth
of its own. Such lessees were like to make agriculture a mockery; the
Mitchell Place, as a farm, became a hissing, and a proverb, and an
astonishment: a circumstance so singularly at variance with remembered
thrift of the reputed owner as to keep green that owner's name. Nor was
that all. As youth became mature and wise, in the sad heartrending
fashion youth has, or flitted to new hearths, in that other heartbreaking
way of youth, it was noted that leases were not to be renewed on any
terms; and the new tenants, in turn, were ever such light and unthrift
folk as the old, always with tall sons and gay daughters--as if the
mythical agent or his ghostly principal had set apart that old house
to mirth and joy and laughter, to youth and love. It was remembered then,
on certain struggling hill farms, that old McClintock had been childless;
and certain hill babies were cuddled the closer for that.

Then, thirty years later, or forty--some such matter--McClintock slipped
back to Vesper unheralded--very many times a millionaire; incidentally a
hopeless invalid, sente