The house was of buff-colored brick.  It was low and very long, with wings extending from its central structure like beautiful arms flung wide in welcome, and at the end of each a building like an ornament balanced in an outstretched hand.  The graceful central portico, rising by several easy steps from the driveway level, the long line of cornice, the window sashes, the delicate wooden railing surmounting the roof, the charming little tower which so gracefully held its place above the geometrical center of the house, the bell tower crowning one wing at its extremity—­all these were white.

No combination of colors can be lovelier, in such a house, than yellow-buff and white, provided they be brightened by some notes of green; and these notes were not lacking, for several aged elms, occupying symmetrical positions with regard to the house, seemed to gaze down upon it with the adoration of a group of mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, as they held their soft draperies protectively above it.  The green of the low terrace—­called a “haha,” supposedly with reference to the mirth-provoking possibilities of an accidental step over the edge—­did not reach the base of the buff walls, but was lost in a fringe of clustering shrubbery, from which patches of lustrous English ivy clambered upward over the brick, to lay strong, mischievous fingers upon the blinds of certain second-story windows.  The blinds were of course green; green blinds being as necessary to an American window as eyelashes to an eye.

Immediately before the portico and centering upon it the drive swung in a spacious circle, from which there broke, at a point directly opposite the portico, an avenue, straight and long as a rifle range, and lovely as the loveliest of New England village greens.  Down the middle of this broad way, between grass borders each as wide as a great boulevard, and double rows of patriarchal trees, ran a road which, in the old days, continued straight to Annapolis, thirty or more miles away, where was the town house of the builder of this manor.  As it stands to-day the avenue is less than half a mile long, but whatever its length, and whether one look down it from the house, or up the gentle grade from the far end, to where the converging lines of grass and foliage and sky melt into the house, it has about it something of unreality, something of enchantment, something of that quality one finds in the rhapsodic landscapes of those poet painters who dream of distant shimmering palaces and supernal vistas peopled by fauns and nymphs dancing amid the trunks of giant trees whose luxuriant dark tops are contoured like the cumulus white clouds floating above them.