Calista looked at the melancholy graveyard, and then turned and looked at the house behind her—the old Stanfield place. The one prospect was not more cheering than the other. The mansion had been a fine one, built of small bricks brought from Europe, and with much ornamental woodwork about it. It stood on a high stone basement, and had a flight of solid gray marble steps rising from each side to a wide porch with brick pillars, and quaint carving about the gable; but the woodwork was gray for want of paint, and in some places falling for want of a timely nail; the steps had sunk away, leaving a yawning chasm between themselves and the floor of the porch; most of the shutters—solid wooden shutters such as people affect in that part of the world—were closed, and others hung by only one hinge. There had been a somewhat pretentious garden at one side of the house, with ornamental trellis-work and a summer-house once covered with climbing roses; but the trellis leaned this way and that, the summer-house had partly fallen in, and the beds were overgrown with grass and weeds. When old General Stanfield was alive, nothing about the place, from the grand house to the smallest chicken-coop, was ever suffered to get out of repair. Then the house was filled with cheerful company from one week's end to another. The second Mrs. Stanfield, like the first, had only one child, a boy, who grew up mostly at home, sometimes under the care of a tutor, sometimes running wild with rod and gun under the charge of a man who had been his father's servant all through the war, and who was still living in a little house which the General had built and given him on the borders of his great estate. By and by the young Richard went to Princeton, and managed, despite a great deal of idleness and some foolish frolics, to scramble through his college course without disgrace or expulsion, and even with some degree of credit. "Well, young Stanfield is fairly off our hands," remarked one of the professors to the president on the evening of commencement. "I wonder what he will turn out?" "There are two things either of which may possibly make a man of him," replied the president. "And they are, to marry a sensible, energetic woman, or to go into the army." "Well, if marrying will save Stanfield, I am sure I hope he will marry," said the professor; "for, much trouble as he has made me, I am very fond of the boy." As it happened, young Stanfield did marry and did go into the army, yet neither of them made much of him. He went to the North on a visit, and there married a pretty, poor girl, with no home of her own, and no fortune save the very liberal outfit provided by the distant cousins with whom she lived.