"Well, George, right glad we are to have you. Where are your sons? I remember them, though 'tis sixteen long years since I left old Williamsburg."
"Gone. The Revolution took my sons. Helen is the last of the family."
"Well, well, indeed that's hard. Independence has cost you colonists as big a price as border-freedom has us pioneers. Come, old friend, forget the past. A new life begins for you here, and it will be one which gives you much. See, up goes a cabin; that will soon be your home."
Sheppard's eye marked the sturdy pioneers and a fast diminishing pile of white-oak logs.
"Ho-heave!" cried a brawny foreman.
A dozen stout shoulders sagged beneath a well-trimmed log.
"Ho-heave!" yelled the foreman.
"See, up she goes," cried the colonel, "and to-morrow night she'll shed rain."
They walked down a sandy lane bounded on the right by a wide, green clearing, and on the left by a line of chestnuts and maples, outposts of the thick forests beyond.
"Yours is a fine site for a house," observed Sheppard, taking in the clean-trimmed field that extended up the hillside, a brook that splashed clear and noisy over the stones to tarry in a little grass-bound lake which forced water through half-hollowed logs into a spring house.