ck with wasting
pools, where sometimes time-honoured weeds blotted the very memory of
the trail into oblivion; when they stood before an old grey mansion,
with what had once been lawns about it and the ruin of a great cedar
hard by its side, its many windows surveying with a grave stare the
wreck and riot of the court it kept--then for the first time Anthony
Lyveden heard the sound of the trumpets.

The physical attraction, no doubt, of the work to be done was crooking
a beckoning finger. To pass his time among these glorious woods, to
have a healthy occupation which would never be gone, to enjoy and
provide for his dog a peaceful possession of the necessities of life,
was an alluring prospect.

Yet this was not the call the trumpets had wound. That distant silvery
flourish was not of the flesh. It was the same fanfare that has sent
men to lessen the mysteries of the unknown world, travel the trackless
earth, sail on uncharted seas, trudge on eternal snows, to sweat and
shiver under strange heavens, grapple with Nature upon the Dame's own
ground and try a fall with the Amazon--with none to see fair play--for
the tale of her secrets.

Anthony's imagination pricked up its flattened ears....

Gazing upon the crookedness about him, he saw it straightened: looking
upon the rough places, he saw them made plain. He saw the desolation
banished, the wilderness made glad. He saw the woods ordered, the
broken roads mended, the bridges rebuilt, streams back in their beds,
vistas unshuttered, avenues cleared.... He saw himself striving, one
of a little company sworn to redeem the stolen property. Man had won
it by the sweat of his brow--his seal was on it yet--that great
receiver Nature must give it up. It was not the repair of an estate
that they would compass; it was the restoration of the kingdom of man.

Marking the light in his employee's eyes, Colonel Winchester could have
flung up his cap. Opening his heart, he spoke with a rough eloquence
of the great days the place had seen, of lords and ladies who had slept
at the house, of coaches that had rumbled over that broken bridge, of a
troop ambushed at the bend of the avenue, of a duel fought upon that
sometime sward....

"The world 'd think me mad. In the clubs I used to belong to they'd
remember that I was always a bit of a crank. To the Press I should be
a curio worth three lines and a photograph of the 'Brigadier Breaks
Stones' order. But there's a zest to