This is a story about a particular place and the people who inhabit it over two centuries. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is accidental. The resemblance of the times involved to real times and the resemblance of this place to a real place, however, are anything but. A carpenter's mate, veteran of the War of 1812, builds a house on a grand scale in Vermont, and over the next 180 years its occupants include a treasure-hunter, a remarkably courageous and outrageous woman, a spectacularly cantankerous Yankee, a dipsomaniac genius, a woman of overpowering beauty and determination, a Native American totally mute, and a child of almost supernatural goodness. The characters are the author's invention, but the matrix for the story, both in time and in space, is factual and real.