great wealth he would buy the house and send to Europe--O not for books
nor for a beautiful wife! but for wine--wines of all the choicest kinds
in bottle and casks--and fill the cellars with it. And his choice wines
would bring choice spirits to help him drink them; and then in the
shade of the old trees they would have their table and sit over their
wine--the merriest, wittiest, wisest, most eloquent gathering in all
the land.

The others in their turn laughed at him, despising his ideal, and then
we set off once more.

They had not thought to put the question to me, because I was only a
boy while they were grown men; but I had listened with such intense
interest to that colloquy that when I recall the scene now I can see
the very expressions of their sun-burnt faces and listen to the very
sound of their speech and laughter. For they were all intimately known
to me and I knew they were telling openly just what their several
notions of a happy life were, caring nothing for the laughter of the
others. I was mightily pleased that they, too, had felt the attractions
of my Dovecot House as a place where a man, whatsoever his individual
taste, might find a happy abiding-place.

Time rolled on, as the slow-going old storybooks written before we were
born used to say, and I still preserved the old habit of pulling up my
horse on coming abreast of each one of the two houses on every journey
to and from town. Then one afternoon when walking my horse past the
Cannon House I saw an old man dressed in black with snow-white hair and
side-whiskers in the old, old style, and an ashen grey face, standing
motionless by the side of one of the guns and gazing out at the
distance. His eyes were blue--the dim weary blue of a tired old man's