cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range of
oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the
white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full
quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for
the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon
of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as Turkey
Creek, but loved best by him under its almost forgotten Indian name of
Chiawassee.

Beyond the valley and its inclosing hills rose the "other mountain,"
blue in the sunlight and royal purple in the shadows--the Cumberland:
source and birthplace of the cooling west wind that was whispering
softly to the cedars on high Lebanon. Thomas Jefferson called the
loftiest of the purple distances Pisgah, picturing it as the mountain
from which Moses had looked over into the Promised Land. Sometime he
would go and climb it and feast his eyes on the sight of the Canaan
beyond; yea, he might even go down and possess the good land, if so the
Lord should not hold him back as He had held Moses.

That was a high thought, quite in keeping with the sense of overlordship
bred of the upper stillnesses. To company with it, the home valley
straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point of view on
the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined
squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the
upturned earth in the fallow places. The old negro quarters on the
Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of disuse, were vine-grown
and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure; and the manor-house
itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy scurrying past it in
the deepening twilight, was now no more than a great square roof with
the cheerful sunlight playing on it.