Colonel Park Lauriston sat in the shadiest corner of the wide veranda ornamenting two sides of the magnificently roomy, many-gabled, "Big House" as it was still known by all the pensioners of this South Carolina plantation, from the Negro field hands to the tenantry and overseers. As he sat, sheltered beneath an enormous spread of white oak branches a soft near-spent gulf breeze bore up to the nostrils of this typically aristocratic Southerner the deliciously combined odors of flowering jasmine, green bay and honeysuckle though it was almost the fag end of the summer season. It was to him like a breath from an oasis in the midst of a hot, sandy desert.
The house stood at the rear of one of those old-fashioned gardens in which grew well-trimmed, dwarf cypress and juniper trees as well as many other specimens of shrubbery and trailing vines; planted and grown in artistic relation to their general appearance, and calculated to satisfy the eye for beauty whether it saw them from the big white sandy road on which it faced, or from the veranda from which Colonel Lauriston now gazed and meditated. Over all this the very house itself towered with a dignified aloofness as if to defy neighborliness with the traffic that passed its distant front gate.
The day was one of those hot sultry mid-August times when Nature seems parched and gasping. Before Colonel Lauriston, on a tete-a-tete table, stood a glass of refreshing julep from which he sipped luxuriously languid swal-
