CHAPTER IX.
A KENTUCKY STOCK FARM.
Cheerless winter days were gone. Spring had
grown bountiful at last, though long; like a miser
"Had kept much wealth of bloom,
Had hoarded half her treasures up in winter's tomb."
But her penitence was wrought in raindrops ringed with fragile gold—the tears that April sheds. Now vernal grace was complete; the only thing to do was to go out in it, to rejoice in its depth of color, in its hours of flooded life, its passion pulse of growth.
"Ashland," that peerless Southern home, was set well in a forest lawn. The great, old-fashioned, deep-red brick house, with its broad verandas, outlined by long rows of fluted columns, ending with wing rooms, was half ivy-covered. A man came out upon the steps and looked across his goodly acres. Day-beams had melted the sheet of silvery dew. A south wind was asweep through fields of wheat, a shadow-haunted cloth of bearded gold, and blades of blue grass were all wind-tangled too. How the
