The Herbert home, a showy country-place in a region of farms, merited a
name; but no one except Mrs. Herbert, who in the first flush of
possession determined so to dignify it, had ever made use of the name
she had chosen after much deliberation. General Herbert himself called
it simply the farm, while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount
Hope it was known as the general's place, which perhaps sufficiently
distinguished it; for its owner was still always spoken of as the
general, though since the war he had been governor of his state.

Rather less than half a century before, Daniel Herbert, then a country
urchin tending cattle on the hillside where now stood his turreted stone
mansion, had decided that some day when he should be rich he would
return and buy that hillside and the great reach of flat river-bottom
that lay adjacent to it, and there build his home. His worldly goods at
the time of this decision consisted of a pair of jeans trousers, a
hickory shirt, and a battered straw hat. For years he had forgotten his
boyish ambition. He had made his way in the world; he had won success in
his profession, the law; he had won even greater distinction as a
soldier in the Civil War; he had been a national figure in politics, and
he had been governor of his state. And then had come the country-bred
man's hunger for the soil. He had remembered that hillside where as a
boy he had tended his father's herds.

He was not a rich man, but he had married a rich woman, and it was her
money that bought the many acres and built the many-turreted mansion.
Wishing, perhaps, to mark the impermanency of the life there and to give
it a purely holiday aspect, Mrs. Herbert had christened the place Idle
Hour; but the governor, beyond occasional participation in local
politics, never again resumed those activities by which he had so
distinguished himself. He wore top-boots and rode about the farm on an