Facing the entrance the land fell away sharply to a miniature valley through which rambled a willow-bordered brook, in whose shallows short-horned cows stood lazily. Beyond, alternating with fields of young grain and verdured pastures like crushed velvet, rose a succession of tranquil slopes crowned with trees that here and there grouped about a white colonial dwelling, with its outbuildings behind it. Beyond, whither wound the Red Road, he could see a drowsy village, with a spire and a cupolaed [Pg 91]court-house; and farther yet a yellow gorge with a wisp of white smoke curling above it marked the course of a crawling far-away railway. Over all the dimming yellow sunshine, and girdling the farther horizon, in masses of purplish blue, the tumbled battlements of the Blue Ridge. His conductor had laboriously descended and now the complaining gates swung open. Before them, as they toiled up the long ascent, the neglected driveway was a riot of turbulent growth: thistle, white-belled burdock, ragweed and dusty mullein stood waist high. “Et’s er moughty fine ol’ place, suh, wid dat big revenue ob trees,” said Uncle Jefferson. “But Ah reck’n et ain’ got none ob de modern connivances.” But Valiant did not answer; his gaze was straight before him, fixed on the noble old house they were approaching. Its wide and columned front peered between huge rugged oaks and slender silver poplars which cast cool long shadows across an unkempt lawn laden with ragged mock-orange, lilac and syringa bushes, its stately grandeur dimmed but not destroyed by the shameful stains of the neglected years. As he jumped down he was possessed by an odd sensation of old acquaintance—as if he had seen those tall white columns before—an illusory half-vision into some shadowy, fourth-dimensional landscape that belonged to his subconscious self, or [Pg 92]that, glimpsed in some immaterial dream-picture, had left a faint-etched memory. Then, on a sudden, the vista vibrated and widened, the white columns expanded and shot up into the clouds, and from every bush seemed to peer a friendly black savage with woolly white hair! “Wishing-House!” he whispered. He looked about him, half expecting—so vivid was the illusion—to see a circle of rough huts under the trees and a multitude of ebony imps dancing in the sunshine. So Virginia had been that secret Never-Never Land, the wondrous fairy demesne of his childhood, with its amiable barbarians and its thickets of coursing grimalkins! The hidden country which his father’s thoughts, sadly recurring, had painted to the little child that once he was, in the guise of an endless wonder-tale! His eyes misted over, and it seemed to him that moment that his father was very near.