We found the weather delightful at that season, the end of summer, and were hospitably entertained.  Our host was a man of means and evidently regarded our visit as a pleasure, and we were therefore correspondingly at our ease, and in a position to act with the coolness of judgment desirable in making so radical a change in our lives.  My cousin placed a horse and buggy at our disposal, and himself acted as our guide until I became somewhat familiar with the country.

I found that grape-culture, while it had never been carried on to any great extent, was not entirely unknown in the neighborhood.  Several planters thereabouts had attempted it on a commercial scale, in former years, with greater or less success; but like most Southern industries, it had felt the blight of war and had fallen into desuetude.

I went several times to look at a place that I thought might suit me.  It was a plantation of considerable extent, that had formerly belonged to a wealthy man by the name of McAdoo.  The estate had been for years involved in litigation between disputing heirs, during which period shiftless cultivation had well-nigh exhausted the soil.  There had been a vineyard of some extent on the place, but it had not been attended to since the war, and had lapsed into utter neglect.  The vines—­here partly supported by decayed and broken-down trellises, there twining themselves among the branches of the slender saplings which had sprung up among them—­grew in wild and unpruned luxuriance, and the few scattered grapes they bore were the undisputed prey of the first comer.  The site was admirably adapted to grape-raising; the soil, with a little attention, could not have been better; and with the native grape, the luscious scuppernong, as my main reliance in the beginning, I felt sure that I could introduce and cultivate successfully a number of other varieties.

One day I went over with my wife to show her the place.  We drove out of the town over a long wooden bridge that spanned a spreading mill-pond, passed the long whitewashed fence surrounding the county fair-ground, and struck into a road so sandy that the horse’s feet sank to the fetlocks.  Our route lay partly up hill and partly down, for we were in the sand-hill county; we drove past cultivated farms, and then by abandoned fields grown up in scrub-oak and short-leaved pine, and once or twice through the solemn aisles of the virgin forest, where the tall pines, well-nigh meeting over the narrow road, shut out the sun, and wrapped us in cloistral solitude.  Once, at a cross-roads, I was in doubt as to the turn to take, and we sat there waiting ten minutes—­we had already caught some of the native infection of restfulness—­for some human being to come along, who could direct us on our way.  At length a little negro girl appeared, walking straight as an arrow, with a piggin full of water on her head.  After a little patient investigation, necessary to overcome the child’s shyness, we learned what we wished to know, and at the end of about five miles from the town reached our destination.