Gordon Keith was the son of a gentleman. And this fact, like the cat the
honest miller left to his youngest son, was his only patrimony. As in
that case also, it stood to the possessor in the place of a good many
other things. It helped him over many rough places. He carried it with
him as a devoted Romanist wears a sacred scapulary next to the heart.

His father, General McDowell Keith of "Elphinstone," was a gentleman of
the old kind, a type so old-fashioned that it is hardly accepted these
days as having existed. He knew the Past and lived in it; the Present he
did not understand, and the Future he did not know. In his latter days,
when his son was growing up, after war had swept like a vast inundation
over the land, burying almost everything it had not borne away, General
Keith still survived, unchanged, unmoved, unmarred, an antique memorial
of the life of which he was a relic. His one standard was that of a
gentleman.

This idea was what the son inherited from the father along with some
other old-fashioned things which he did not know the value of at first,
but which he came to understand as he grew older.

When in after times, in the swift rush of life in a great city, amid
other scenes and new manners, Gordon Keith looked back to the old life
on the Keith plantation, it appeared to him as if he had lived then in
another world.

Elphinstone was, indeed, a world to itself: a long, rambling house, set
on a hill, with white-pillared verandahs, closed on the side toward the
evening sun by green Venetian blinds, and on the other side looking away
through the lawn trees over wide fields, brown with fallow, or green
with cattle-dotted pasture-land and waving grain, to the dark rim of