The contrast now was sweeping. The Fairchild’s house was still the largest residential structure on the Burfield road, which led from Thessaly across the hills to remote and barbarous latitudes, but respect had long since ceased to accrue to it upon the score of its size. To the local eye, it was the badge and synonym of “rack and ruin;” while sometimes strangers of artistic tastes, chancing to travel by this unfrequented road, would voice regrets that such a prospect as opened to the vision just here, with the noble range of hills behind for the first time looming in their true proportions, should be spoiled by such a gaunt, unsightly edifice, with its tumble-down surroundings, its staring windows cheaply curtained with green paper, and its cheerless, shabby color--that indescribable gray with which rain and frost and Father Time supplant unrenewed white. The garden, comprising a quarter-acre to the east of the house, was a tangled confusion of flowers and weeds and berry-bushes run wild, yet the effect somehow was mean rather than picturesque. The very grass in the yard to the west did not grow healthfully, but revealed patches of sandy barrenness, created by feet too indifferent or unruly to keep the path to the barns. Yet the neighbors said, and Lemuel had come himself to feel, that the blame of this sad falling off was not fairly his. There had been a fatal defect in the legacy. The one needful thing which the Hon. Seth Fairchild did _not_ leave his elder son was the brains by means of which he himself, in one way or another, had gathered together a substantial competency, won two elections to the State Senate, and established and held for himself the position of leading citizen in his town--that most valued and intangible of American local distinctions. But while Lemuel’s brown hair curled so prettily, and his eyes shone with the modest light of wealthy and well-behaved youth, nobody missed the brains. If there was any change in the management of the farm, it passed unnoticed, for all attention was centred on the great problem, interesting enough always when means seeks a help-meet, but indescribably absorbing in rural communities, where everybody knows everybody and casual gallants never come for those luckless damsels neglected by native swains--Whom will he marry?