l's plan for the great main park with its terraces, miles of shell
and marl drives, its lakes, bridges, arbours, pools, shelters, canals,
fully satisfied Cardross. Hamil's engineers were still occupied with the
drainage problem, but a happy solution was now in sight. Woodcutters had
already begun work on the great central forest avenue stretching
straight away for four miles between green jungles topped by giant oaks,
magnolias, and palmettos; lesser drives and chair trails were being
planned, blazed, and traced out; sample coquina concrete blocks had been
delivered, and a rickety narrow-gauge railroad was now being installed
with spidery branches reaching out through the monotonous flat woods and
creeping around the boundaries where a nine-foot game-proof fence of
woven buffalo wire was being erected on cypress posts by hundreds of
negroes. Around this went a telephone and telegraph wire connected with
the house and the gamekeeper's lodges.

Beyond the vast park lay an unbroken wilderness. This had already been
surveyed and there remained nothing to do except to pierce it with a
wide main trail and erect a few patrol camps of palmetto logs within
convenient reach of the duck-haunted lagoons.

And now toward the end of the month, as contractor after contractor
arrived with gangs of negroes and were swallowed up in the distant
woodlands, the interest in the Cardross household became acute. From
the front entrance of the house guests and family could see the great
avenue which was being cleared through the forest--could see the vista
growing hour by hour as the huge trees swayed, bent, and came crashing
earthward. Far away the noise of the felling sounded, softened by
distance; snowy jets of steam puffed up above the trees, the panting of
a toy locomotive came on the breeze, the mean, crescendo whine of a
saw-mill.

"It's the only way to do things," said Cardross again and again; "make
up your mind quickly that you want to do them, then do them quickly. I
have no patience with a man who'll dawdle about a bit of property for
years and finally start to improve it with a pot of geraniums after he's
too old to enjoy anything except gruel. When I plant a tree I don't
plant a sapling; I get a machine and four horses and a dozen men and I
put in a full-grown tree so that I can sit under it next day if I wish
to and not spend thirty years waiting for it to grow. Isn't that the way
to do things, Hamil?"

Hamil said yes. It was