The coach had swung around a turn in the road where a great, bald rock and a border of trees on the right hand, hid all that lay beyond on this gentle slope. The other girls cried out at the beauty of the scene.
A gable-roofed farmhouse, dazzlingly white, with green blinds, stood end to the road. There were great, wide-branched oaks all about it. The sod was clipped close and looked like velvet. Yet the surroundings of the homestead were rather wild, as though Nature had scarcely been disturbed by the hand of man since the original clearing was made here in the hillside forest.
There were porches, and modern buildings and “ells” added to the great old house, but the two huge chimneys, one at either end, pronounced the building to be of the architecture of the earliest settlers in this section of the State.
There were beds of old-fashioned flowers; there was a summerhouse on the lawn, covered with vines; altogether it was a most beautiful and “homey” looking place.
“Whose place is it?” repeated the questioner.
“Oh, that? Caslon’s,” grunted Bob. “He’s the chap who won’t sell out to father. Mean old thing.”
“Why, it’s a love of an old place!” exclaimed Helen.
“Yes. It is the one house father was going to let stand on the hill beside our own. You see, we wanted to put our superintendent in it.”
Just then an old gentleman came out of the summer house. He was a portly, gray mustached, bald-headed man, in clean linen trousers and a white shirt with a short, starched bosom. He wore no collar or necktie, but looked clean and comfortable. He smiled at the young people on the coach jovially.
Behind him stood a motherly lady some years his junior. She was buxom and smiling, too.