One full half of the ground floor of the great mansion constituted the single drawing room, wainscoted to the ceiling and provided with three huge fire places built for the burning of cord wood. The floors were as white as snow, the wainscoting as black as night with age and jealous polishing with beeswax. After the architectural manner of the country, there was a broad porch in front and another in rear, each embowered in honeysuckles and climbing rose bushes. A passageway, more than twenty feet in width ran through the building, connecting the two porches and constituting the most generally used sitting room of the house. It had broad oaken doors reaching across its entire width. They stood always open except during the very coldest days of the mild Virginia winter, there being no thought of closing them even at night. For there were no criminal classes in that social fabric, and if there had been, the certainty that the master of the mansion slept upon its ground floor and knew what to do with a shot gun, would have been a sufficient deterrent to invasion of the premises. There were two large fire places in the hall for winter use. But the glory of the place was the stairway, with its broad ashen steps and its broader landings. Up and down it had passed generations of happy maidens and matrons. Up and down it, prattling children had played and romped and danced in happy innocence. Up and down it wedding guests and funeral attendants had come and gone, carrying their burdens of flowers for the bride and blossoms for the bier. Upon it had been whispered words of love and tenderness that prepared the way for lives of happiness, and sorrowful utterances that soothed and softened grief. Upon its steps young men of chivalric soul had wooed maidens worthy of their devotion. Upon its landings young maidens had softly spoken those words of consent which ushered in lives of rejoicing. The furniture of the house was in keeping with its spaciousness and its solidity. Huge sofas were everywhere, broad enough for beds and long enough for giants to stretch their limbs upon. Commodious, plantation-made chairs of oak invited every guest to repose in the broad hallway. In the drawing room, and in the spacious dining hall the sedate ticking of high standing clocks marked time only to suggest its abundance in that land of leisure, and to invite its lavish use in enjoyment. Now add to all this still life, the presence of charming people--men of gracious mien and young women of immeasurable charm, young women whose rich and softly modulated voices were exquisite music, and whose presence was a benediction--and you may faintly understand the surroundings in which Arthur Brent found himself on that deliciously perfect Sunday afternoon in June, in the year of our Lord, 1859.