the services indicated in connection
with this estate should continue till this date. We hand you
herewith our check for $236.20 (two hundred and thirty-six
dollars and twenty cents), the balance in your favor, for which
please send receipt,

"And oblige,
"Yours very truly,
"(Enclosure) EMERSON AND BALL."

He turned to the memorandum. It showed a sizable initial deposit
against which was entered a series of annual tax payments with minor
disbursements credited to "Inspection and care." The tax receipts were
pinned to the account.

The larger wrapper contained an unsealed envelope, across which was
written in faded ink and in an unfamiliar dashing, slanting handwriting,
his own name. The envelope contained a creased yellow parchment, from
between whose folds there clumped and fluttered down upon the floor a
long flattish object wrapped in a paper, a newspaper clipping and a
letter.

Puzzledly he unfolded the crackling thing in his hands. "Why," he said
half aloud, "it's--it's a deed made over to me." He overran it swiftly.
"Part of an old Colony grant ... a plantation in Virginia, twelve
hundred odd acres, given under the hand of a vice-regal governor in the
sixteenth century. I had no idea titles in the United States went back
so far as that!" His eye fled to the end. "It was my father's! What
could he have wanted of an estate in Virginia? It must have come into
his hands in the course of business."

He fairly groaned. "Ye gods! If it were only Long Island, or even Pike
County! The sorriest, out-at-elbow, boulder-ridden, mosquito-stung old
rock-farm there would bring a decent sum. But Virginia! The place where
the dialect stories grow. The paradise of the Jim-crow car and the
hook-worm, where land-poor, clay-colored colonels with goatees sit in
green wicker lawn-chairs and watch their shadows go round the house,
while they guzzle mint-juleps and cuss at lazy 'cullud pussons.' Where
everybody is an F. F. V. and everybody's grandfather was a patroon, or
whatever they call 'em, and had a thousand slaves 'befo de wah'!"

Who ever heard of Virginia nowadays, except as a place people came
_from_? The principal event in the history of the state since the Civil
War had been the discovery of New York. Its men had moved upon the
latter en masse, coming with the halo about them of old Southern names
and legends of planter hospitality--and had married North