The house was built in the edge of a growth of great oaks and elms, which threw their arms out over even the lofty gables as though in protection.  Tradition had it that the reason the building had never been completed was that the old master would have been obliged to cut down a favorite elm in order to make room for it; and he had declared that since his wife had died and all his children but one had followed her, the house was large enough as it was.  So it stood as he had left it, with its two tall chimneys, one at each end of the mid-body of the house, marking the two great fireplaces, yet another chimney at the other end of the lesser wing.

Straight through the mid-body of the house ran a wide hall, usually left open to all the airs of heaven; and through this one could see far out over the approach, entirely through the house itself, and note the framed picture beyond of woods glowing with foliage, and masses of shrubbery, and lesser trees among which lay the white huts of the negroes.  Still to the left, beyond the existing wing, lay the fenced vegetable gardens where grew rankly all manner of provender intended for the bounteous table, whose boast it was that, save for sugar and coffee, nothing was used at Tallwoods which was not grown upon its grounds.

So lived one, and thus indeed lived more than one, baron on American soil not so long ago, when this country was more American than it is to-day—­more like the old world in many ways, more like a young world in many others.  Here, for thirty years of his life, had lived the present owner of Tallwoods, sole male of the family surviving in these parts.

It might have been called matter of course that Warville Dunwody should be chosen to the state legislature.  So chosen, he had, through sheer force of his commanding nature, easily become a leader among men not without strength and individuality.  Far up in the northern comer, where the capital of the state lay, men spoke of this place hid somewhere down among the hills of the lower country.  Those who in the easier acres of the northwestern prairie lands reared their own corn and swine and cotton, often wondered at the half-wild man from St. Francois, who came riding into the capital on a blooded horse, who was followed by negroes also on blooded horses, a self-contained man who never lacked money, who never lacked wit, whose hand was heavy, whose tongue was keen, whose mind was strong and whose purse was ever open.

The state which had produced a Benton was now building up a rival to Benton.  That giant, then rounding out a history of thirty years’ continuous service in the Senate of the United States, unlike the men of this weaker day, reserved the right to his own honest and personal political belief.  He steadily refused to countenance the extending of slavery, although himself a holder of slaves; and, although he admitted the legality and constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, he deplored that act as much as any.