d with
lean, lantern-jawed Japheth Pettigrass, the Major's stock-and-farm
foreman. And although the Dabney stock was pedigreed, you kept your wits
about you; else Pettigrass got much the better of you in the trade, like
the shrewd, calculating Alabama Yankee that he was.

Ardea was born in Paris in the twelfth year of the exile; and the
Virginian mother, pining always for the home land, died in the fifteenth
year. Afterward, Captain Louis fought a long-drawn, losing battle,
figuring bravely in his infrequent letters to his father as a rising
miniature painter; figuring otherwise to the students of the Latin
Quarter as "_ce pauvre Monsieur D'Aubigne_;" leading his little girl
back and forth between his lodgings and the studio where he painted
pictures that nobody would buy, and eking out a miserable existence by
giving lessons in English when he was happy enough to find a pupil.

The brave letters imposed on the Major, as they were meant to do; and
Ardea, the loyal, happening on one of them in her first Deer Trace
summer, read it through with childish sobs and never thereafter opened
her lips on the story of those distressful Paris days. Later she
understood her father's motive better: how he would not be a charge on
an old man rich in nothing but ruin; and the memory of the pinched
childhood became a thing sacred.

How the Major, a second Rip Van Winkle, found his way to New York, and
to the pier of the incoming French Line steamer, must always remain a
mystery. But he was there, with the fierce old eyes quenched and
swimming and the passionate Dabney lips trembling strangely under the
great mustaches, when the black-frocked little waif from the Old World
ran down the landing stage and into his arms. Small wonder that they
clung to each other, these two at the further extremes of three
generations; or that the child opened a door in the heart of the fierce
old partizan which was locked and doubly barred against all others.

As may be imagined, the Major got away from Yankeeland with his charge
as soon as a train could be made to serve; and he was grim and
forbidding to all and sundry until the Cumberland Mountains had
displaced the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge on the western horizon.
Indeed, the grimness,--to all save Ardea,--persisted quite to and
through the transformed and transforming city at the eastern foot of
Lebanon. Major Caspar was not in tune with the bravura of modern
progress, and if he had been, his