Tallwoods itself needed no other fence than the vast wall of hills, and had none save where here and there the native stone had been heaped up roughly into walls, along some orchard side. The fruits of the apple, the pear and the peach grew here handsomely, and the original owner had planted such trees in abundance. The soil, though at first it might have been, called inhospitable, showed itself productive. The corn stood tall and strong, and here and there the brown stalks of the cotton plant itself might have been seen; proof of the wish of the average Southerner to cultivate that plant, even in an environment not wholly suitable. All about, upon the mountain sides, stood a heavy growth of deciduous trees, at this time of the year lining the slopes in flaming reds and golds. Beyond the valley's rim, tier on tier, stately and slow, the mountains rose back for yet a way--mountains rich in their means of frontier independence, later to be discovered rich also in minerals, in woods, in all the things required by an advancing civilization. Corn, swine and cotton,--these made the wealth of the owner of Tallwoods' plantation and of the richer lands in the river bottoms below. These products brought the owner all the wealth he needed. Here, like a feudal lord, master of all about him, he had lived all his life and had, as do all created beings, taken on the color and the savor of the environment about him. Rich, he was generous; strong, he was merciful; independent, he was arrogant; used to his own way, he was fierce and cruel when crossed in that way. Not much difference, then, lay between this master of Tallwoods and the owner of yonder castle along the embattled Rhine, or the towered stronghold of some old lord located along an easy, wandering, English stream; with this to be said in favor of this solitary lord of the wilderness, that his was a place removed and little known. It had been passed by in some manner through its lack of appeal to those seeking cotton lands or hunting grounds, so that it lay wholly out of the ken and the understanding of most folk of the older states.