to cultivate that plant, even in an environment not wholly suitable.  All about, upon the mountain sides, stood a heavy growth of deciduous trees, at this time of the year lining the slopes in flaming reds and golds.  Beyond the valley’s rim, tier on tier, stately and slow, the mountains rose back for yet a way—­mountains rich in their means of frontier independence, later to be discovered rich also in minerals, in woods, in all the things required by an advancing civilization.

Corn, swine and cotton,—­these made the wealth of the owner of Tallwoods’ plantation and of the richer lands in the river bottoms below.  These products brought the owner all the wealth he needed.  Here, like a feudal lord, master of all about him, he had lived all his life and had, as do all created beings, taken on the color and the savor of the environment about him.  Rich, he was generous; strong, he was merciful; independent, he was arrogant; used to his own way, he was fierce and cruel when crossed in that way.  Not much difference, then, lay between this master of Tallwoods and the owner of yonder castle along the embattled Rhine, or the towered stronghold of some old lord located along an easy, wandering, English stream; with this to be said in favor of this solitary lord of the wilderness, that his was a place removed and little known.  It had been passed by in some manner through its lack of appeal to those seeking cotton lands or hunting grounds, so that it lay wholly out of the ken and the understanding of most folk of the older states.

If in Tallwoods the owner might do as he liked, certainly he had elected first of all to live somewhat as a gentleman.  The mansion house was modeled after the somewhat stereotyped pattern of the great country places of the South.  Originally planned to consist of the one large central edifice of brick, with a wing on each side of somewhat lesser height, it had never been entirely completed, one wing only having been fully erected.  The main portion of the house was of two stories, its immediate front occupied by the inevitable facade with its four white pillars, which rose from the level of the ground to the edge of the roof, shading the front entrance to the middle rooms.  Under this tall gallery roof, whose front showed high, white and striking all across the valley, lay four windows, and at each side of the great double doors lay yet other two windows.  On either side of the pillars and in each story, yet other two admitted light to the great rooms; and in the completed wing which lay at one side of the main building, deep embrasures came down almost to the level of the ground, well hidden by the grouped shrubbery which grew close to the walls.  The visitor approaching up the straight gravel walk might not have noticed the heavy iron bars which covered these, giving the place something the look of a jail or a fortress.  The shrubs, carelessly, and for that reason more attractively planted, also stood here and there over the wide and smooth bluegrass lawn.