age of the house denoted that one of the earliest settlers had been
quick to perceive its advantages. A hundred years had already elapsed
since the masons had run up those walls of rusty hornblende rock, and it
was even said that the leaden window-sashes, with their diamond-shaped
panes of greenish glass, had been brought over from England, in the days
of William Penn. In fact, the ancient aspect of the place--the tall,
massive chimney at the gable, the heavy, projecting eaves, and the
holly-bush in a warm nook beside the front porch, had, nineteen years
before, so forcibly reminded one of Howe's soldiers of his father's
homestead in mid-England, that he was numbered among the missing after
the Brandywine battle, and presently turned up as a hired hand on the
Barton farm, where he still lived, year in and year out.

An open, grassy space, a hundred yards in breadth, intervened between
the house and the barn, which was built against the slope of the knoll,
so that the bridge to the threshing-floor was nearly level, and the
stables below were sheltered from the north winds, and open to the
winter sun. On the other side of the lane leading from the high-road
stood a wagon-house and corn-crib--the latter empty, yet evidently, in
spite of its emptiness, the principal source of attraction to the
visitors. A score of men and boys peeped between the upright laths, and
a dozen dogs howled and sprang around the smooth corner-posts upon which
the structure rested. At the door stood old Giles, the military
straggler already mentioned--now a grizzly, weather-beaten man of
fifty--with a jolly grin on his face, and a short leather whip in his
hand.

"Want to see him, Miss Betsy?" he asked, touching his mink-skin cap, as
Miss Lavender crawled through the nearest panel of the lofty picket
fence.