midnight
I asked him , but my demand made no apparent dent , for he danced on without answering . At an hour after that of midnight the revelers came home and left me at my gate , by request , to walk alone in the brilliant spring moonlight through my garden to the wide door back of the white pillars . After they had seen me safely started , they glided away and I stood on the steps and watched Nell and Mark reclaim their family from a tall dark figure that carried out two loads to the parental arms . Then the hush that comes upon the world in the midnight hours fell over the Poplars and I stood leaning against one of the tall pillars and reveled in it . Goodloets is one of the tradition-grayed old towns that are rooted deep in the Harpeth Valley since the days of the Colonies , and in it can be found perhaps the purest Americanism on the American continent . The Poplars , under whose broad roof I made the seventh generation nested and fledged , spreads out its wings and gables upon a low hill which is the first swell of the Harpeth hills , and the rest of the old town stretches out on the hillside before it down to the valley , in which runs the Harpeth River , curving around the town and flowing out of the valley to the Mississippi . Behind the Poplars roll the fields and meadows of the Home Farm , which has given food and sustenance to the Poplars ' brood since the days of the redskins , when it was cleared by the first Powers and his servants , with muskets ready to fire into the surrounding forests .