Turning in from the Marquette road to Sterling Blaydon’s new country house, “Thornhill” as they called it, a visitor with a sculptor’s eye might describe the formation of the land as the huge thigh of a woman, resting horizontally on the earth. The private driveway ran along the crest which sloped on both sides downward to gentle valleys, while the whole ridge tapered in width gradually to a round end or knee on which rested the house in a semi-circle of green. Beyond the house lay a few hundred feet of clipped lawn and well spaced trees, and then the Titan calf plunged into the earth, its declivitous sides covered with exposed rock and a thick undergrowth of every imaginable scrub and bramble, with a plentiful scattering of dogwood and plumb and thorn. It was holy with blossoms in the Spring, beginning with the ghostly shad-bush. The edge of the hill overlooked a broad meadow fifty yards below, as flat as a lake. Spread out in three directions from this crowning point lay Blaydon’s land, perhaps a third of it in rocky knolls and wood, and the remainder under cultivation by tenant farmers. The driveway to the site led almost due west but the axis of the house itself, which was narrow and long despite its irregularities, turned toward the south. It was built to the shingle eaves of rubble-rock and dominated at either end by two enormous chimneys of the same gorgeous, parti-coloured material, all of which had been found on the place. Broad verandahs, a wide, tiled terrace reached by French windows; a quaint Dutch Colonial door and portico facing the road; screened balconies skilfully masked by the eaves; the great living and dining rooms and library which took up almost all of the lower floor; the correspondingly spacious chambers overhead, attested its inhabitants’ means and love of comfort. The entrance lawn and slopes to the north were laid out in series of irregular, charming gardens. On the southeast the hill descended almost horizontally from the tiled and parapeted terrace near the house, so that from the living room windows one looked through the tops of trees to the Country Club on another hill less than a mile away.