What was the matter with us that these Southern gentlemen stood the British fire while, if we faced it, we crumpled and gave ground; or, if we shunned it, we ran disgracefully? Save only at Boston had we driven the red-coats on land. The British flame had scorched us on Long Island, singed us in New York, blasted us at Falmouth and Quebec, and left our armies writhing in the ashes from Montreal to Norfolk. And yet how tranquil, how fair, how ominously calm lay our Valley Land in the sunshine, ringed here by our blue mountains where no slightest cloud brooded in an unstained sky! And more still, more strange even than the untroubled calm of Tryon, lay the Summer House in its sunlit, soundless, and green desolation. Where, through the long days, nothing moved on the waste of waters save where a sun-burnished reed twinkled. Where, under star-powdered skies, no wind stirred; and only the vague far cry of some wandering wild thing ever disturbed that vast and velvet silence. * * * * * Long before she came near me to speak to me, and even before she had glanced at me from the west porch, whither she took her knitting in the afternoons, I had seen Penelope. From where I lay on my trundle in Sir William's old gun-room I could see out across the hallway and through the door, where the west veranda ran. In the mornings either my Indian, Yellow-Leaf, or Nick Stoner mounted guard there, watching the green and watery wastes to the northward, while his comrade freshened my sheets and pillows and cleansed my room. In the afternoons one o' them went a-fishing or prowling after meat for our larder, or, sometimes, Nick went a-horse to Mayfield on observation, or to Johnstown for news or a bag of flour. And t'other watched from the veranda roof, which was railed, and ran all around the house, so that a man might walk post there and face all points of the compass. As for Penelope, I soon learned her routine; for in the morning she was in the kitchen and about the house--save only she came not to my room--but swept and dusted the rest, and cooked in the cellar-kitchen. Sometimes I could see her in apron and pink print, drawing water from the orchard well, and her skirt tucked up against the dew. Sometimes I saw her early in the garden, where greens grew and beans and peas; or sometimes she hoed weeds where potatoes and early corn stood in rows along a small strip planted between orchard and posy-bed. And sometimes I could see her a-milking our three Jersey cows, or, with a sickle, cutting green fodder for my mare, Kaya, whose dainty hoofs I often heard stamping the barn floor. But after the dinner hour, and when the long, still afternoons lay listlessly betwixt mid-summer sun and the pale, cool dusk, she came from her chamber all freshened like a faint, sweet breeze in her rustling petticoat of sheer, sprigged stuff, to seat herself on the west veranda with her knitting.