d, and we feel that it all depends on
ourselves. We started out with nothing ahead of us but my ambitions and
Billy's energy, and a few hundred dollars which my guardian turned over
to me when I married Billy on my twenty-first birthday.

As soon as we were married, we came to Virginia. Billy and I had an idea
that everything south of the Mason and Dixon line was just waiting for
us, and we wanted to earn the eternal gratitude of the community by
helping it along. But after we had lived at Jefferson Corners for a
little while, we began to feel that there wasn't any community. There
didn't seem to be any towns like our nice New England ones, with
sociable trolley-cars connecting them and farmhouses in a lovely line
between. You can ride for miles through this country and never pass
anything but gates. Then way up in the hills you will see a clump of
trees, and in the clump you can be pretty sure there is a house. In the
winter when the leaves are off the trees you can see the house, but in
the summer there is no sign of it. In the old days they seemed to feel
that they were lacking somewhat in delicacy if they exposed their
mansions to the rude gaze of the public.

There was one mansion that Billy took me to now and then. It was empty,
and that was why we went. The big houses which were occupied were not
open to us, except in a trades-person sort of fashion, and Billy and I
are not to be condescended to--we had a pair of grandfathers in the
_Mayflower_. But that doesn't count down here, where everybody goes back
to William the Conqueror.

That great big empty house was a fine place for our Sunday afternoon
outings. We always went to church in the morning, and people were very
kind, but it was kindness with a question-mark. You see Billy and I live
over the store, and none of them had ever lived on anything but
ancestral acres.

So our Sunday mornings were a bit stiff and disappointing, but our
afternoons were heavenly. We discovered the Empty House in the spring,
and there was laurel on the mountains and the grass was young and green
on the slopes, and the sky was a faint warm blue with the sailing
buzzards black against it. Billy and I used to stop at the second gate,
which was at the top of the hill, and look off over the other hills
where the pink sheep were pastured. I am perfectly sure that there are
no other sheep in the whole wide world like those Albemarle sheep. The
spring rains turn the red clay into a mud