Over most of our friends we had one advantage. They had taken old-fashioned farms and made them over into modern country places. But once upon a time, sixty or seventy years back, the place of which we were now the proud proprietors had been the property of a man of means and good taste, a college professor; and, by the somewhat primitive standards of those days, it had been an estate of considerable pretensions. 

 This gentleman had done things of which we were now the legatees. For example, he had spared the fine big trees, which grew about the dooryard of his house; and when he had cleared the tillable acres he had left in them here and there little thickets and little rocky copses which stood up like islands from the green expanses of his meadows. The pioneer American farmer's idea of a tree in a field or on a lawn was something that could be cut down right away. Also the original owner had planted orchards of apples and groves of cherries; and he had thrown up stout stone walls, which still stood in fair order. 

 But—alas!—he had been dead for more than forty years. And during most of those forty years his estate had been in possession of an absentee landlord, a woman, who allowed a squatter to live on the property, rent free, upon one unusual condition—namely, that he repair nothing, change nothing, improve nothing, and, except for the patch where he grew his garden truck, till no land. As well as might be judged by the present conditions, the squatter had lived up to the contract. If a windowpane was smashed he stuffed up the orifice with rags; if a roof broke away he patched the hole with scraps of tarred paper; if a tree fell its molder-ing trunk stayed where it lay; if brambles sprang up they flourished unvexed by bush hook or pruning blade. 

 Buried in this wilderness was an old frame residence, slanting tipsily on its rotted sills; and the cellar under it was a noisome damp hole, half filled with stones that had dropped out of the tottering foundation walls. There was a farmer's cottage which from decay and neglect seemed ready to topple over; likewise the remains of a cow barn, where no self-respecting cow would voluntarily spend a night; the moldy ruins of a coach house, an ice house and a chicken house; and flanking these, piles of broken, crumbling boards to mark the sites of sundry cribs and sheds. 

 The barn alone had resisted neglect and the gnawing tooth of time. This was because it had been built in the time when barns were built to stay. It had big, hand-hewn oak sticks for its beams and rafters and sills; and though its roof was a 

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