Major Caspar Dabney until you have summered and wintered him. But the
Dabneys of Deer Trace--this was the old name of the estate, and it
obtains to this day among the Paradise Valley folk--figure so largely in
Thomas Jefferson's boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in
these retrospective glimpses.

To know the Major even a little, you should not refer him to any of the
accepted types, like Colonel Carter, of Cartersville, or that other
colonel who has made Kentucky famous; this though I am compelled to
write it down that Major Caspar wore the soft felt hat and the
full-skirted Prince Albert coat, without which no reputable Southern
gentleman ever appears in the pages of fiction. But if you will ignore
these concessions to the conventional, and picture a man of heroic
proportions, straight as an arrow in spite of his sixty-eight years,
full-faced, well-preserved, with a massive jaw, keen eyes that have lost
none of their lightnings, and huge white mustaches curling upward
militantly at the ends you will have the Major's outward presentment.

Notwithstanding, this gives no adequate hint of the contradictory inner
man. By turns the most lovingly kind and the most violent, the most
generously magnanimous and the most vindictive of the unreconstructed
minority, Caspar Dabney was rarely to be taken for granted, even by
those who knew him best. Of course, Ardea adored him; but Ardea was his
grandchild, and she was wont to protest that she never could see the
contradictions, for the reason that she was herself a Dabney.

It was about the time when Thomas Jefferson was beginning to reconsider
his ideals, with a leaning toward brass-bound palaces on wheels and
dictatorial authority over uniformed lackeys and other of his fellow
creatures, that fate dealt the Major its final stab and prepared to pour