One day I went over with my wife to show her the place. We drove out of
the town over a long wooden bridge that spanned a spreading mill-pond,
passed the long whitewashed fence surrounding the county fair-ground,
and struck into a road so sandy that the horse's feet sank to the
fetlocks. Our route lay partly up hill and partly down, for we were in
the sand-hill county; we drove past cultivated farms, and then by
abandoned fields grown up in scrub-oak and short-leaved pine, and once
or twice through the solemn aisles of the virgin forest, where the tall
pines, well-nigh meeting over the narrow road, shut out the sun, and
wrapped us in cloistral solitude. Once, at a cross-roads, I was in doubt
as to the turn to take, and we sat there waiting ten minutes--we had
already caught some of the native infection of restfulness--for some
human being to come along, who could direct us on our way. At length a
little negro girl appeared, walking straight as an arrow, with a piggin
full of water on her head. After a little patient investigation,
necessary to overcome the child's shyness, we learned what we wished to
know, and at the end of about five miles from the town reached our
destination.

We drove between a pair of decayed gateposts--the gate itself had long
since disappeared--and up a straight sandy lane, between two lines of
rotting rail fence, partly concealed by jimson-weeds and briers, to the
open space where a dwelling-house had once stood, evidently a spacious
mansion, if we might judge from the ruined chimneys that were still
standing, and the brick pillars on which the sills rested. The house
itself, we had been informed, had fallen a victim to the fortunes of
war.

We alighted from the buggy, walked about the yard for a while, and then
wandered off into the adjoining vineyard. Upon Annie's complaining of