“I think it very beautiful and restful,” Elsie replied. “This wilderness of flowers looks like fairyland. You have roses running on the porch around the whole length of the house.”
“Yes, Papa was crazy over the trailing roses, and kept planting them until the house seems just a frame built to hold them, with a roof on it. But you can see the river through the arches from three sides. Ben Cameron helped me set that big beauty on the south corner the day he ran away to the war——”
“The view is glorious!” Elsie exclaimed, looking in rapture over the river valley.
The village of Piedmont crowned an immense hill on the banks of the Broad River, just where it dashes over the last stone barrier in a series of beautiful falls and spreads out in peaceful glory through the plains toward Columbia and the distant sea. The muffled roar of these falls, rising softly through the trees on its wooded cliff, held the daily life of the people in the spell of distant music. In fair weather it soothed and charmed, and in storm and freshet rose to the deep solemn growl of thunder.
The river made a sharp bend as it emerged from the hills and flowed westward for six miles before it turned south again. Beyond this six-mile sweep of its broad channel loomed the three ranges of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the first one dark, rich, distinct, clothed in eternal green, the last one melting in dim lines into the clouds and soft azure of the sky.
As the sun began to sink now behind these distant peaks, each cloud that hung about them burst into a blazing riot of colour. The silver mirror of the river caught their shadows, and the water glowed in sympathy.
As Elsie drank the beauty of the scene, the music of the falls ringing its soft accompaniment, her heart went out in a throb of love and pity for the land and its people.
“Can you blame us for loving such a spot?” said Marion. “It’s far more beautiful from the cliff at Lover’s Leap. I’ll take you there some day. My father used to tell me that this world was Heaven, and that the spirits would all come back to live here when sin and shame and strife were gone.”
“Are your father’s poems published?” asked Elsie.
“Only in the papers. We have them clipped and pasted in a scrapbook. I’ll show you the one about Ben Cameron some day. You met him in Washington, didn’t you?”