The other farm was of less importance.  Had you ridden from the front door of the Merediths northward for nearly a mile, you would have reached the summit of a slope sweeping a wide horizon.  Standing on this summit any one of these bright summer days, you could have seen at the foot of the slope, less than a quarter of a mile away on the steep opposite side, a rectangle of land covering some fifty acres.  It lay crumpled into a rough depression in the landscape.  A rivulet of clear water by virtue of indomitable crook and turn made its way across this valley; a woodland stood in one corner, nearly all its timber felled; there were a few patches of grain so small that they made you think of the variegated peasant strips of agricultural France; and a few lots smaller still around a stable.  The buildings huddled confusedly into this valley seemed to have backed toward each other like a flock of sheep, encompassed by peril and making a last stand in futile defence of their right to exist at all.

What held the preeminence of castle in the collection of structures was a small brick house with one upper bedroom.  The front entrance had no porch; and beneath the door, as stepping-stones of entrance, lay two circular slabs of wood resembling sausage blocks, one half superposed.  Over the door was a trellis of gourd vines now profusely, blooming and bee-visited.  Grouped around this castle in still lower feudal and vital dependence was a log cabin of one room and of many more gourd vines, an ice-house, a house for fowls, a stable, a rick for hay, and a sagging shed for farm implements.

If the appearance of the place suggested the struggles of a family on the verge of extinction, this idea was further borne out by what looked like its determination to stand a long final siege at least in the matter of rations, for it swarmed with life.  In the quiet crystalline air from dawn till after sunset the sounds arising from it were the clamor of a sincere, outspoken multitude of what man calls the dumb creatures.  Evidently some mind, full of energy and forethought, had made its appearance late in the history of these failing generations and had begun a fight to reverse failure and turn back the tide of aggression.  As the first step in self-recovery this rugged island of poverty must be made self-sustaining.  Therefore it had been made to teem with animal and vegetable plenty.

On one side of the house lay an orderly garden of vegetables and berry-bearing shrubs; the yard itself was in reality an orchard of fruit trees, some warmed by the very walls; under the shed there were beegums alive with the nectar builders; along the garden walks were frames for freighted grape-vines.  The work of regeneration had been pushed beyond the limits of utilitarianism over into a certain crude domain of aesthetics.  On one front window-sill what had been the annual Christmas box of raisins had been turned into a little hot-bed of flowering plants;