The green of the low terrace--called a "haha," supposedly with reference
to the mirth-provoking possibilities of an accidental step over the
edge--did not reach the base of the buff walls, but was lost in a fringe
of clustering shrubbery, from which patches of lustrous English ivy
clambered upward over the brick, to lay strong, mischievous fingers upon
the blinds of certain second-story windows. The blinds were of course
green; green blinds being as necessary to an American window as
eyelashes to an eye.

Immediately before the portico and centering upon it the drive swung in
a spacious circle, from which there broke, at a point directly opposite
the portico, an avenue, straight and long as a rifle range, and lovely
as the loveliest of New England village greens. Down the middle of this
broad way, between grass borders each as wide as a great boulevard, and
double rows of patriarchal trees, ran a road which, in the old days,
continued straight to Annapolis, thirty or more miles away, where was
the town house of the builder of this manor. As it stands to-day the
avenue is less than half a mile long, but whatever its length, and
whether one look down it from the house, or up the gentle grade from the
far end, to where the converging lines of grass and foliage and sky melt
into the house, it has about it something of unreality, something of
enchantment, something of that quality one finds in the rhapsodic
landscapes of those poet painters who dream of distant shimmering
palaces and supernal vistas peopled by fauns and nymphs dancing amid the
trunks of giant trees whose luxuriant dark tops are contoured like the
cumulus white clouds floating above them.

There is nothing "baronial," nothing arrogant, about Doughoregan Manor,
for though the house is noble, its nobility, consisting in spaciousness,
simplicity, and grace combined with age, fits well into what, it seems