ith large steel-blue eyes and beautifully cut,
mocking lips. A rapier with a jeweled hilt hung at his side, and one
white hand, half buried in snowy ruffles, held a beribboned cane with
which, as he talked, he ruthlessly decapitated the pink and white
morning-glories with which the porch was trellised.

The house to which the porch belonged was long and low, built of wood,
with many small windows, and at either end a great brick chimney. From
the porch to the water, a hundred yards away, stretched a walk of
crushed shells bisecting an expanse of green turf dotted with noble
trees--the cedar and the cypress predominating. Diverging from this
central walk were two narrower paths which, winding in and out in
eccentric figures, led, on the one hand, to a rustic summer-house
overgrown with honeysuckle and trumpet-vine, and on the other to a tiny
grotto constructed of shells and set in a tangle of periwinkle. Along
one side of the house, and protected by a stout locust paling overrun
with grape-vines, lay the garden, where flowers and vegetables
flourished contentedly side by side, the hollyhocks and tall white
lilies, the hundred-leaved roses and scarlet poppies showing like gilded
officers amidst the rank and file of sober esculents. Behind the house
were clustered various offices, then came an orchard where the June
apples and the great red cherries were ripening in the hot sunshine,
then on the shore of a second and narrower creek rose the quarters for
the plantation servants, white and black--a long double row of cabins,
dominated by the overseer's house and shaded by ragged yellow pines.
Along one shore of this inlet was planted the Indian corn prescribed by
law, and from the other gleamed the soft yellow of ripening wheat, but
beyond the water and away to the westward stretched acre after acre of
tobacco, a sea of vivid green, broken only by an occasional shed or
drying house, and merging at last into the darker hue of the forest.
Over all the fair scene, the flashing water, the velvet marshes, the
smiling fields, the fringe of dark and mysterious woodland, hung a
Virginia heaven, a cloudless blue, soft, pure, intense. The air was
full of subdued sound--the distant hum of voices from the fields of
maize and tobacco, the faint clink of iron from the smithy, the wash and
lap of the water, the drone of bees from the hives beneath the eaves of
the house. Great bronze butterflies fluttered in the sunshine, brilliant
humming