make and spend and when he set no bound to the number of his guests or the length of their stay under his roof. The dark gray stucco and weather-beaten shingles, together with the old-time arrangement of the doors and windows, gave to the building a very ancient look, as if it might have stood there since a time when men lived as did the old fighting and feasting barons of medieval England. Bucks' antlers hung in the hall, along with heavy rifles and fowling pieces, and a few striking ancestral portraits looked down from the dark walls. It had known much revelry of a thoroughly proper sort, this grand old home of the DeKays, and its inmates, for several generations, had exerted a marked influence in the social and political affairs of the state. The present owner had been a fighting general in the confederate army and had won by heroic bravery the right to his distinguished military title. When the party from Birmingham reached this charming old house by the river, it was late in the afternoon. Several other guests had already arrived from Montgomery, Pensacola and Mobile. A corps of obsequious and clever negro servants, of both sexes and various ages, were ready to attend all comers. The host, a slender man of middle height, wearing a gray military beard, greeted every body with low bows and profuse words of welcome, whilst his rather stout and altogether good and motherly wife had a way that was welcome itself. Reynolds and Moreton were given rooms adjoining and connected by a door, their windows looking down a long shining reach of the reed-bordered river. An ideal place to sit and smoke, Moreton thought, as he lighted a cigarette and drew a chair so that he could watch the silvery winged kite sailing about in the distance, its forked tail and small head giving it the effect of a fanciful Japanese design wavering on the background of blue-gray sky. A flock of domestic geese were on the river, floating idly, now and then lifting their wings and flapping them rapidly and screaming in clamorous concert. Wide fields, gently rolling, and distinctly showing the ridged and parallel rows of cotton and corn stalks, swept away almost to the horizon, bounded on one hand by the river, and on the other by a thick wood, where even the deciduous trees still retained a trace of summer greenery. Something in the air suggested the sea, and a sensation, as of extreme remoteness and isolation, took possession of Moreton's mind. It was his first experience of life on a low-country plantation. The idyllic simplicity, quietude and serenity impressed him as much as did the stateliness and amplitude. Here was an estate of thousands of acres--many miles in extent--bearing on its surface all the marks of almost primitive modes of husbandry. Worm fences, shallow plowing, the use of hoe and wooden rake; gates with pins and sockets instead of latches, clap-boards instead of shingles and plank, and so on throughout the