And owlet in the crevice sleeping,
And antique chairs and broidered bed,
By housewife’s patient needle spread.—Anon.
Old Lyon Hall lay at the foot of the Porcupine, an offshoot of the Alleghanies, in one of the wildest and most picturesque counties in Virginia.
It was built in the Tudor style of domestic architecture, very irregularly, with many gable ends, gothic windows and twisted chimneys. Its walls of old red sandstone contrasted gloomily with the dark hue of the evergreen trees that bristled up above it, and gave the mountain its descriptive name.
Heavy woods, bare, gray crags, and tumbling torrents surrounded it, and gave a savage and sombre aspect to the scene. Below the Hall a turbulent little river, spanned by a rustic bridge, rushed and roared along its rocky bed.
The Hall was very old. It had been built nearly two hundred years ago by a Scotchman named Saul Sauvage Lyon, who had received a grant of the land from James the First. It had remained ever since in the family of the founder, whose descendants had frequently distinguished themselves, as soldiers, or statesmen, in every epoch of the country’s history, either as a colony or a commonwealth.
Some few years since, being the date of this story, the master of the Old Lyon Hall and Manor was General Leonard Lyon, a retired army officer, and a veteran of the war of eighteen hundred and twelve.
General Lyon had married very early in his youth, and had enjoyed many years of calm domestic happiness. But now his wife and children were all dead, and his only living descendant was his grandchild, the beautiful Anna Lyon, “sole daughter of ‘his’ house.”
Added to the great sorrow of bereavement was vexation, that, for the want of male heirs, his old family estate must at last “fall to the distaff.”