a 
e. 
; 

ON THE LEE SHORE 
BY BROUGHTON BRANDENBURG 
= 
HEN the business day was 
over and the lights were lit 
. in the peaceful valley town 
that lay at the foot of the 




Ge 
A 
LS te BA Ms of the hour that Col. Denby 
fara Grier should come in a slow 
ERIS dignified fashion out of the 
a—<* great door of the hill house 
an seating himself in a big roomy porch chair 
light a long cigar which glowed through the 
evening like a great rosy firefly in the soft dark. 
From my window a little farther down on the 
opposite side of the street I have watched the 
old banker countless times as he sat there tilted 
back, his foot against one of the huge colonial 
pillars, and on the steps descending to the ter- 
raced lawn before him would be the dim group 
of white and color, his three daughters and some 
of their friends. Perhaps the tall, graceful 
slender white figures moving about among the 
peony beds would be Grace and Carolyn, the 
older girls, while the animated elf that always 
clung close to her father’s place in the evening 
time was certain to be Mildred, the child who 
in that day was shyly entering the mysterious 
world of womanhood. But no matter where 
they were dispersed at dusk, the later dark 
always found them clustered about their father’s 
feet and ever and anon till a late hour I could 
hear his resonant, drawling voice in one of those 
stories which had made him famous throughout 
the State. 
The last time I was in Virginia I passed up 
the street and by the door of the old mansion. I 
stopped abruptly as it came into view above the 
thicket of lilac bushes that hedged the lower 
corner of the ground. A ruthless, marring hand 
seemed to have wiped from its prospect all of its 
rare old spirit, charm and beauty. 
The imposing white gate-posts with their 
capitals were gone. The peony beds lay fallow, 
the steps were sagged, the pillars were hacked 
and scarred, the walks and the terraces sadly 
unkempt, and the sign of a boarding-house 
hung before the open door. The familiar chair 
and its venerable occupant, the master of the 
house, the gay friends and the stately daughters 
were gone. I knew the story well. I was in- 
formed of each detail of the thing that had 
befallen the family on the lee shore, for the 
wreck is spoken of to this day in all the region, 
¢; 
and so I was, I thought, fully prepared for the 
sight of the place, but I confess that I stopped 
short with a quick choke and stood fora moment 
looking abstractedly at the ghost of what had 
been. 
It was the final chapter in a long lesson of 
protection of all that any man loves from what 
may befall it when he is no longer able to stand 
between his dearest and most treasured and the 
steady march of attacking circumstance. I am 
going to tell this story with its two wings. that 
touch in conclusion. In fact in these latter days 
it has seemed to me that there was a command- 
ing excuse for its being written and now it shall 
be set down, perhaps spread broadcast, and 
may it do the good that seems to me to lie within 
its scope. 
I first knew the old colonel and his attractive 
family through his sister, one of the finest types 
of the southern gentlewoman it has ever been 
my privilege to encounter. She had married a 
New York broker, Edward Raymond, sprung 
of Connecticut Yankee stock and a member of 
one of the best. known firms in Wall Street. 
Their house on Madison Avenue was one in 
which the gracious unobtrusive hospitality of 
the South was blended perfectly with the exact 
and brilliant life habits of New York. There 
one met people who were distinctly interesting 
on their own account, and with Mrs. Raymond 
the power to attract a coterie which any woman 
of society might envy was never used for any 
purposes of family aggrandizement but was 
merely recognized as the factor that brought to 
her door the friends about whom she really 
cared. Her days at home were a pleasure where 
with other hostesses they might have been re- 
garded as mildly unfortunate but necessary 
occasions, 
Raymond in those days was, outside of his 
home, a hard bold man of business, intent on 
building up a great fortune. I have been in his 
office at more than one critical hour on ’Change 
when he sat at his desk, quietly giving brief 
succinct orders whose success or failure meant 
almost everything to him, and yet his voice 
never seemed to change in those times, his 
kindly eyes rarely lifted from the papers before 
him, his unlit cigar was set at a precise right 
angle to the firm line of his mouth and jaw and 
when his hands passed to execute some detail, 
to pick up a pen or a telephone receiver, they 
