Behind the ample, wide-ranging, wooden house--spotless in its purity of white paint, dignified by its ranges of dark-green, slatted shutters, its grey-brown, shingled roofs, and many gables--a certain puritan simplicity pervading it, somewhat quaintly at variance with its highly-developed appliances of modern comfort, and the almost surprisingly civilised examples of modern humanity now domiciled within it--behind it the ground trended upward, through pleasant orchards of apple, pear, and peach trees, past commodious wooden barns and stables, long, grey snake-fences, and corn patches, where the pumpkins began to grow golden beneath the wide, glistening leaves, the giant cobs and silken tassels of the maize. Down to meet this spacious foreground unencumbered by superfluous detail, wandered the sparse, untamed, ubiquitous woodland of the New England States. Everywhere slender, long-limbed trees, endless scrub, festooning vines, heavy with bunches of little fox-grapes, and below outcroppings of grey rock. Some two months hence, the edge of the woodland would be fringed by spires of golden-rod and processions of purple asters, while the maples set forth an amazement of verdigris green, lemon-colour, and all manner of radiant pinks and scarlets, and sumach dyed the hollows blood-red; but as yet the woods retained their summer tints. There was a slight want of atmosphere no doubt. The landscape was oddly lacking in values of distance; while the sky was blue to the point of crudity, and the sun blazed, had blazed, would blaze, with a youthful and tireless energy--not unsuggestive of the conversation of Virginia and all those friends of hers--throughout the unshadowed and unmitigated day. To right and left were other hospitable mansions, the limits of their private grounds unmarked by jealous wall or paling. A wide-ranging spirit of good-nature and confidence appeared to reign; yet, in point of fact, the inhabitants of these agreeable country houses formed a distinctly close corporation. The Van Reenan property had been broken up into building lots on the death of its first owner, old Erasmus Van Reenan, merchant and financier of New York, nearly seventy years ago. But the said lots had been acquired by members of his numerous family; and still Van Reenans, direct and collateral, their children and their children's children, found relaxation at times in this amiable, American Capua. But woe to any intruder from the outer world, unless furnished with irreproachable passport and the very highest of high-class references, who should venture to set sacrilegious foot on this thrice sacred ground! For, as Laurence had frequently reflected--not without a measure of amusement--nothing is so essentially aristocratic as a democratic country, nothing so socially exclusive as an immature civilisation.