host. No one knew when the house had been built; though there was an old
corner stone on which local antiquarians professed to decipher the
figures "1693," and that year was assigned by tradition as the date of
its foundation.

It was a long crazy building, with a great sloping roof, a wide porch
running its entire length, and attached to its sides and rear in all
sorts of unexpected ways and places were numerous out houses and offices.
Behind its high brick chimneys rose the thick growth of Lovel's Woods,
crowning the ridge that ran between Beaver Pond and the Strathsey river
to the sea. The house faced southwards, and from the cobbled court before
it meadow and woodland sloped to the beaches and the long line of sand
dunes that straggled out and lost themselves in Strathsey Neck. To the
east lay marshes and the dunes and beyond them the Strathsey, two miles
wide where its waters met those of the Atlantic; west lay the great
curve, known as the Second Beach, the blue surface of Deal Bay, and a
line of rocky shore, three miles in length, terminated by Rough Point,
near which began the out-lying houses of Monday Port.

The old hostelry took its name from a giant oak which grew at its
doorstep just to one side of the maple-lined driveway that led down to
the Port Road, a hundred yards or so beyond. This enormous tree spread
its branches over the entire width and half the length of the roof.
Ordinarily, of course, its foliage was as green as the leaves on the
maples of the avenue or on the neighbouring elms, and the name of the Inn
might have seemed to the summer or winter traveller an odd misnomer; but
in autumn when the frost came early and the great mass of green flushed
to a deep crimson it could not have been known more appropriately than as
the Inn at the Red Oak.