Furthermore, it had occurred to me that of persons of southern accent, or merely southern extraction, whom I had encountered in the North, a strangely high percentage were not only of “fine old southern family,” but of peculiarly tenacious purpose in respect to having the matter understood.

I cannot pretend to say when the “professional Southerner,” as we know him in New York, began to operate, nor shall I attempt to place the literary blame for his existence—­as Mark Twain attempted to place upon Sir Walter Scott the blame for southern “chivalry,” and almost for the Civil War itself.  Let me merely say, then, that I should not be surprised to learn that “Colonel Carter of Cartersville”—­that lovable old fraud who did not mean to be a fraud at all, but whose naivete passed the bounds of human credulity—­was not far removed from the bottom of the matter.

In the tenor of these sentiments my companion shared—­though I should add that he complained bitterly about agreeing with me, saying that with hats alike, and overcoats alike, and trunks alike, and suitcases alike, we already resembled two members of a minstrel troupe, and that now since we were beginning to think alike, through traveling so much together, our friends would not be able to tell us apart when we got home again—­in spite of this he admitted to the same suspicion of the South as I expressed.  Wherefore we entered the region like a pair of agnostics entering the great beyond:  skeptical, but ready to be “shown.”

It was with the generous purpose of “showing” us that a Baltimore friend of ours called for us one day with his motor car and was presently wafting us over the good oiled roads of Maryland, through sweet, rolling country, which seemed to have been made to be ridden over upon horseback.

It was autumn, but though the chill of northern autumn was in the air, the coloring was not so high in key as in New York or New England, the foliage being less brilliant, but rich with subtle harmonies of brown and green, blending softly together as in a faded tapestry, and giving the landscape an expression of brooding tenderness.

After passing through Ellicott City, an old, shambling town quite out of character with its new-sounding name, which has such a western ring to it, we traversed for several miles the old Frederick Turnpike—­formerly a national highway between East and West—­swooping up and down over a series of little hills and vales, and at length turned off into a private road winding through a venerable forest, which was like an old Gothic cathedral with its pavement of brown leaves and its tree-trunk columns, tall, gray, and slender.

When we had progressed for perhaps a mile, we emerged upon a slight eminence commanding a broad view of meadow and of woodland, and in turn commanded by a great house.