Two Little Confederates by Thomas Nelson Page

The "Two Little Confederates" lived at Oakland. It was not a handsome / place, as modern ideas go, but down in Old Virginia, where the / standard was different from the later one, it passed in old times as / one of the best plantations in all that region. The boys thought it / the greatest place in the world, of course excepting Richmond, where / they had been one year to the fair, and had seen a man pull fire out / of his mouth, and do other wonderful things. It was quite secluded. It / lay, it is true, right between two of the county roads, the / Court-house Road being on one side, and on the other the great / "Mountain Road," down which the large covered wagons with six horses / and jingling bells used to go; but the lodge lay this side of the one, / and "the big woods," where the boys shot squirrels, and hunted / 'possums and coons, and which reached to the edge of "Holetown," / stretched between the house and the other, so that the big gate-post / where the semi-weekly mail was left by the mail-rider each Tuesday / and Friday afternoon was a long walk, even by the near cut through the / woods. The railroad was ten miles away by the road. There was a nearer / way, only about half the distance, by which the negroes used to walk / and which during the war, after all the horses were gone, the boys, / too, learned to travel; but before that, the road by Trinity Church / and Honeyman's Bridge was the only route, and the other was simply a / dim bridle-path, and the "horseshoe-ford" was known to the initiated / alone.

The mansion itself was known on the plantation as "the great-house," / to distinguish it from all the other houses on the place, of which / there were many. It had as many wings as the angels in the vision of / Ezekiel.