Thirty years before our story opens, Magnolia Park was one of the finest places in middle Florida. But after the death of Mrs. Hetherton, who had been born and married there, and who spent a part of every winter in her old home, there was no one left to care particularly for it, as Mr. Hetherton had lands enough of his own to look after. So the place began to go down, and when the war swept like a wave of fire over the South, it was left tenantless and unprotected save by an old negro, Uncle Sim, and his wife, Aunt Judy, who lived in the whitewashed cabin on the grounds, paying no heed to the rumors of freedom which reached them from time to time, as the terrible conflict between brother and brother went on. They were as free as they ever wished to be, they said, and all they asked was to be let alone and left to die on the old place. So they staid, and did their best to guard the house of which they were so proud, and which, at two different times, was made a kind of hotel for the soldiery, who were scouring the country. A night and a day the Boys in Blue halted there, carrying off whatever they conveniently could of the many valuable articles with which the house was furnished, and one of them, an officer, having a hand-to-hand fight with old Judy, who tried to wrench from him a pair of silver candlesticks he was stuffing in his pockets. He took away the candlesticks and also a black eye and a bloody nose which Aunt Judy had given him as a memento of his stay at Magnolia Park. A week later, and a party of the Boys in Gray swooped down upon the place and spent the night in the house and fed on Judy’s corn cakes and bacon, and killed Uncle Sim’s big turkey, and turned the once handsome rooms into barracks, but were prevented from committing as extensive depredations as their predecessors had done simply because, aside from the six-legged piano on which they pounded Dixie vigorously, and the massive bedsteads and chairs and tables, there was little or nothing to steal. Warned by the lesson learned from their first visitors, Sim and Judy had dug a deep hole at the side of their cabin, and lining it with blankets had filled it with the remaining valuables of the house; then, covering them with another heavy blanket, they heaped dirt and sand upon them, and built over the spot a rude hen-house, where several motherly hens brooded over their young chickens. After this Sim and Judy lived in comparative ease until the war was over and peace and quiet reigned once more in Florida. Then the premises were let to a young Kentuckian, who soon grew tired of his bargain, and gave it up, and the house was empty again.