visions begot of the strenuous times in which he lived, and which were
the staple subject of conversation of all those with whom he came in
contact, yet his shadowy dreams had something of the past in them, and
more, far more, of that future which to youth must ever be all
important. But this young dreamer was not as dreamers often are, with
muscle subservient to brain, the physical less highly developed than the
mental powers; on the contrary, he was a lad well knit together, his
limbs strong and supple, endurance and health unmistakable, a lad who
must excel in every manly exercise and game. Perhaps it was this very
superiority over his fellows which, for the time being, at any rate, had
made him a dreamer. While other boys, reproducing in their games that
which was happening about them, fought mimic battles, inflicted and
suffered mimic death, experienced terrible siege in some small copse
which to their imagination stood for a beleaguered city, or carried some
hillock by desperate and impetuous assault, this boy, their master in
running, in swimming, in wrestling, in sitting a horse as he galloped
freely, was not content with mimicry, but dreamed of real deeds in a
real future.

It was a fair scene of which this boy, for the moment, seemed to be the
centre. Before him lay the great expanse of Chesapeake Bay scintillating
in the light of the afternoon, a sail here and there catching the
sunlight and standing out clearly from a background of distant haze. A
wide creek ran sinuously into the land, the deep blue of its channel
distinct from the shallow waters and the swamps from which a startled
crane rose like an arrow shot across the vault of the sky. To the right,
surrounded by its gardens and orchards, stood a house, long, low, large
and rambling, the more solid successor to the rough wooden edifice which
had been among the first to rise when this state of Virginia had become
a colony for cavaliers from England. Flowers trailed over the wide porch