In the warm sun of the southern morning the great plantation lay as
though half-asleep, dozing and blinking at the advancing day. The
plantation house, known in all the country-side as the Big House,
rested calm and self-confident in the middle of a wide sweep of
cleared lands, surrounded immediately by dark evergreens and the
occasional primeval oaks spared in the original felling of the
forest. Wide and rambling galleries of one height or another crawled
here and there about the expanses of the building, and again paused,
as though weary of the attempt to circumvent it. The strong white
pillars, rising from the ground floor straight to the third story,
shone white and stately, after that old southern fashion, that
Grecian style, simplified and made suitable to provincial purses by
those Adams brothers of old England who first set the fashion in
early American architecture. White-coated, with wide, cool, green
blinds, with ample and wide-doored halls and deep, low windows, the
Big House, here in the heart of the warm South-land, was above all
things suited to its environment. It was a home taking firm hold upon
the soil, its wide roots reaching into traditions of more than one
generation. Well toward the head of the vast Yazoo-Mississippi Delta,
the richest region on the face of the whole earth, the Big House
ruled over these wide acres as of immemorial right. Its owner,
Colonel Calvin Blount, was a king, an American king, his right to
rule based upon full proof of fitness.

In the heart of the only American part of America, the Big House,
careless and confident, could afford to lie blinking at the sun, or
at the broad acres which blinked back at it. It was all so safe and
sure that there was no need for anxiety. Life here was as it had been
for generations, even for the generation following the upheaval of
the Civil War. Open-handed, generous, rich, lazily arrogant, kindly