On either side of the pillars and in each story, yet other two admitted light to the great rooms; and in the completed wing which lay at one side of the main building, deep embrasures came down almost to the level of the ground, well hidden by the grouped shrubbery which grew close to the walls.

The visitor approaching up the straight gravel walk might not have noticed the heavy iron bars which covered these, giving the place something the look of a jail or a fortress.

The shrubs, carelessly, and for that reason more attractively planted, also stood here and there over the wide and smooth bluegrass lawn.
The house was built in the edge of a growth of great oaks and elms, which threw their arms out over even the lofty gables as though in protection.

Tradition had it that the reason the building had never been completed was that the old master would have been obliged to cut down a favorite elm in order to make room for it; and he had declared that since his wife had died and all his children but one had followed her, the house was large enough as it was.

So it stood as he had left it, with its two tall chimneys, one at each end of the mid-body of the house, marking the two great fireplaces, yet another chimney at the other end of the lesser wing.
Straight through the mid-body of the house ran a wide hall, usually left open to all the airs of heaven; and through this one could see far out over the approach, entirely through the house itself, and note the framed picture beyond of woods glowing with foliage, and masses of shrubbery, and lesser trees among which lay the white huts of the negroes.