He had much of the spirit of the backwoodsman. He was tall and powerful, standing six feet two without his shoes. He was very fond of wearing old, easy-fitting clothes—as he was of smoking old pipes. His affection for his old hats was remarkable. To see him about the place tinkering at any odd job which proved too much for the ingenuity of others, delighting in saws and hammers, and pounding his fingers, fond of gardening, and all the rough industries of a large country place, the last idea a stranger would have associated with him was that of authorship. Vaughan found many types at hand which later offered not a few suggestions for some of the figures in The Prodigal Judge. Bob Yancey in particular had his prototype in Kelly Dove. Mr. Dove and my brother were great cronies, and I remember when years later he was reading the first chapters of The Prodigal Judge to us at Gunston Hall, we instantly recognized Mr. Dove in the character of Bob Yancey. Farming the land and restoring the house were fascinating and time-engrossing occupations, but Vaughan still continued his writing, and it was at Woodlawn that he wrote his second novel, The Fortunes of the Landrays, which the McClures published. Always a most deliberate and unhurried worker, he grew even more deliberate and unhastening as time went on. He worked hard, but did not work rapidly. There were times when a chapter would seem to write itself, but I fancy he was a little suspicious of easy composition so far as it concerned his own work. He was always at his desk when not engaged in some congenial outdoor occupation. He wrote a great deal on scraps, throwing much away. He seldom or never crossed a “t” nor dotted an “i”. Often he left great blank spaces and half pages without a line upon them, covering others closely with his fine writing. In their externals his methods of composition seemed rather slovenly, and his manuscripts would have been the despair of any copyist but his wife; but he knew what he was about, and it was utterly useless to attempt any reformation in his habits. He had great patience. He did not satisfy himself easily. He wrote and rewrote and polished and polished again. Not infrequently he would put aside his work on a novel to write a short story. He wrote a dozen or more, all of which found their way into print except one, Mollie Darling, written not long before his death, which appears in this volume for the first time. Just before the publication of The Fortunes of the Landrays, Woodlawn Mansion was sold and I bought a place in the north of England. In England Vaughan met with an understanding a little more complete than he had known in America, except from Mrs. Howells. He made friends immediately, and fitted into the easy agreeable country-house life as perfectly as he had fitted into the different phases of American life he had known. The Fortunes of the Landrays came out while we were at Augill Castle.