with some
other old-fashioned things which he did not know the value of at first,
but which he came to understand as he grew older.
When in after times, in the swift rush of life in a great city, amid
other scenes and new manners, Gordon Keith looked back to the old life
on the Keith plantation, it appeared to him as if he had lived then in
another world.
Elphinstone was, indeed, a world to itself: a long, rambling house, set
on a hill, with white-pillared verandahs, closed on the side toward the
evening sun by green Venetian blinds, and on the other side looking away
through the lawn trees over wide fields, brown with fallow, or green
with cattle-dotted pasture-land and waving grain, to the dark rim of
woods beyond. To the westward "the Ridge" made a straight, horizontal
line, except on clear days, when the mountains still farther away showed
a tenderer blue scalloped across the sky.
A stranger passing through t-
he country prior to the war would have heard
much of Elphinstone, the Keith plantation, but he would have seen from
the main road (which, except in summer, was intolerably bad) only long
stretches of rolling fields well tilled, and far beyond them a grove on
a high hill, where the mansion rested in proud seclusion amid its
immemorial oaks and elms, with what appeared to be a small hamlet lying
about its feet. Had he turned in at the big-gate and driven a mile or
so, he would have found that Elphinstone was really a world to itself;
almost as much cut off from the outer world as the home of the Keiths
had been in the old country. A number of little blacks would have opened
the gates for him; several boys would have run to take his horse, and he
would have found a legion of servants about the house. He would have
found that the hamlet was composed of extensive stables and barns, with
shops and houses, within which mech-