To reach the top of the height a circuit must be made. There was no path leading straight from the house. Through the grounds at the back of the house the way wound along between beds of acheranthus and cineraria which made warm strips of bordering, with scarlet pelargoniums lighting up the beds beyond in a blaze of brilliance. Turning then into a carriage road, the party followed it to the north of the height which Maggie had called the South Pitch, and struck off then southwards into a little, mossy, rocky, hardly-traced path under the trees.
"This is easy enough," said Meredith, guiding his cart somewhat carefully, however, to avoid severe jolts which would have endangered the cream. "I do not see where the pitch is yet."
"Ah, but you will when you get to the south end," said Maggie. "Look out, Ditto, here's a rock in your way. And these huckleberry bushes are very thick."
Following on over rocks and bushes, they soon came to the place Maggie meant, and Meredith rested his cart and stood still to look. From the southern brow of the little hill, the ground fell steeply away; so steeply that the eye had unhindered range over the river which lay below, and the hills bordering it, and the point of Gee's Point which there pushes the river to the eastward. Not a tree-branch even was in the way; river and hills lay in the October light, still, glowing, fair, as only October can be.
"Do you like it, Meredith?" asked Maggie wistfully. Her opinion of Mosswood had been long a fixed one.
"I have never seen such a place!"
"Uncle Eden had his tent up here one summer, and he cut away all the branches and trees that were in the way of the view; for he wanted to lie in his tent at night and be able to look out and see the river and the hills in the moonlight."
"And did he have this wall built too?" asked Meredith, seeing that the platform where he stood was held up on the side towards the river by a regularly laid, though unmortared, wall.
"Oh," said Esther laughing, "that wall was laid a hundred years ago, Meredith. Soldiers laid it; our soldiers; all Mosswood was fortified; this is a breastwork."
"Whom do you mean by 'our soldiers'?"