It was in the most desirable neighborhood; there was fishing and boating; the situation was "sightly." We borrow the last word from the hill folk, the presentee landlords; the producers, or, to put it quite bluntly, the workers.
As the years slipped by, it crept into common knowledge that not every one could obtain a lease of Mitchell House.

Applicants, Vesperian or "foreigners," were kept waiting; almost as if the invisible agent were examining into their eligibility.

And it began to be observed that leaseholders were invariably light, frivolous, pleasure-loving people, such as kept the big house crowded with youth and folly, to company youth of its own.

Such lessees were like to make agriculture a mockery; the Mitchell Place, as a farm, became a hissing, and a proverb, and an astonishment: a circumstance so singularly at variance with remembered thrift of the reputed owner as to keep green that owner's name.

Nor was that all.