"We'll go out to the vineyard first," suggested the professor, hurrying ahead, with Mrs. Randall close behind him, in the narrow path beaten along the tangle of yellow Jerusalem apples and prickly Spanish needles and wild grasses. The farm was still in sorry order. The ground of the orchard close to the house was covered with tangled, browning weeds, in some of the trees the late winesaps shone red and ruddy. Frances stopped to fill her hands with them. "Don't eat those; I have some splendid ones in the house for you." "These are fine!" She set her white teeth in the red fruit. "I like these best, I like to pull them." "Eve!" he bantered. "Are they forbidden?" "Nothing is, here; it's all yours--" he began eagerly. "Oh, thanks! Had you a Spanish ancestor?" "English on each side," he declared stoutly. "You look it," she assented, with one quick look at his fair face and a swift noting of his sturdiness. "The Saxons are truth-tellers," he urged. But the professor had paused at the pig-pen near the orchard's edge. "Fine hogs!" he called back to his host, "Cheshire?" Edward joined him reluctantly. "That one is," he said, pointing to the pinkish-white sides of a lazy, fat wallower. "He'll weigh two hundred." "I expect he will." "Seems a pity to kill him." "I have the mother." "Who's going to make your sausage and dry your lard?" asked Mrs. Randall quickly. "Lizzie." "What, trust that darkey with it?" "There's nothing else to do." "Come on, Frances," called her father, for that young woman was still loitering under the apple-trees. Mr. Holloway took the lead towards the vineyard. The Northrup estate numbered many acres, but not many valuable ones. They were too high up the mountains, which ran steeply to their crests a bare five hundred yards behind the house. This narrow valley at its base sheltered from the north was fertile, and wound straight at the foot of the peaks for nearly a mile. Close to the house was the vineyard; beyond the vines, the cornfields, above there on the mountain side, the woodland. Frances followed, but her words of praise were for the autumn woods, the towering peaks, or, far down below them, the misty valley. About the house was more the women could praise. There was the pipe bringing its clear mountain water from a far off spring to the kitchen door, there was the great ground floor room of the wing stored with apples shining redly against the white of the walls. Here Mrs. Randall paused. "I am going into the kitchen," she announced. But the professor and Frances and Edward went up the stairway to the covered porch joining the wing to the main building, and by the rear door of "the chamber" into the house. "You must go through the house," insisted Edward. The professor begged off. "No, I'll sit here; it isn't often I see such a fire as this. I've been over it before, and many times, years ago."