[Illustration:  Tallwoods]

The plantation itself was a little kingdom, and largely supplied its own wants.  Mills, looms, shops,—­all these were part of the careless system, easy and opulent, which found support and gained arrogance from a rich and generous environment.  The old house itself, if it might be called old, built as it had been scarce thirty years before, lay in the center of a singular valley, at the edge of the Ozark Hills.  The lands here were not so rich as the wide acres thirty miles or more below, where on the fat bottom soil, black and deep, the negroes raised in abundance the wealth-making crop of the country.  On the contrary, this, although it was the capital of the vast Dunwody holdings thereabout, was chosen not for its agricultural richness so much as for its healthfulness and natural beauty.

In regard to these matters, the site could not better have been selected.  The valley, some three or four miles across, lay like a deep saucer pressed down into the crest of the last rise of the Ozarks.  The sides of the depression were as regular as though created by the hands of man.  Into its upper extremity there ran a little stream of clear and unfailing water, which made its entrance at an angle, so that the rim of the hills seemed scarcely nicked by its ingress.  This stream crossed the floor of the valley, serving to water the farms, and, making its way out of the lower end by a similar curious angle, broke off sharply and hid itself among the rocks on its way out and down from the mountains—­last trace of a giant geology which once dealt in continental terms, rivers once seas, valleys a thousand miles in length.  Thus, at first sight, one set down in the valley might have felt that it had neither inlet nor outlet, but had been created, panoplied and peopled by some Titanic power, and owned by those who neither knew nor desired any other world.  As a matter of fact, the road up through the lower Ozarks from the great Mississippi, which entered along the bed of the little stream, ended at Tallwoods farm.  Beyond it, along the little river which led back into the remote hills, it was no more than a horse path, and used rarely except by negroes or whites in hunting expeditions back into the mountains, where the deer, the wild turkey, the bear and the panther still roamed in considerable numbers at no great distance from the home plantation.

Tallwoods itself needed no other fence than the vast wall of hills, and had none save where here and there the native stone had been heaped up roughly into walls, along some orchard side.  The fruits of the apple, the pear and the peach grew here handsomely, and the original owner had planted such trees in abundance.  The soil, though at first it might have been, called inhospitable, showed itself productive.  The corn stood tall and strong, and here and there the brown stalks of the cotton plant itself might have been seen; proof of the wish of the average Southerner