this climate, she repairs the waste made in these and other "pleasant places."

In the dining-room hang several good pictures, one a portrait of Colonel Byrd, another, by Vandyke, of Pope's Martha Blount. She led the crook-backed poet a dance with her tempers and caprices, but she does not look the termagant, as she queens it in this dismantled room, a spaniel at her feet, a roll of music in her hand, a harpsichord in the background.

Less out of place here than the imperious beauty is a lacquered Chinese cabinet, blackand-gilt, that once belonged to Anne Boleyn. Syphers would barter a section of his immortal soul for it.

It was while we waited in the porch for our carriage, hearkening to the "sweet jargoning of the bird-vespers, that the pretty anecdote was told of Mrs. William Harrison's rejoinder to an English guest who asked to see the aviary from which came the warbling that poured into his windows from dawn to sunrise. Leading him to the backdoor, she opened it, and pointed to the grove beyond.

"It is there!" she answered, merrily.

Parting at the gate with the courtly cavalier who had guided us through the lovely bit of

woodland outlying the grounds, we drove in the sunset calm, back to Lower Brandon, arriving just in season to dress for dinner.

Of the tranquil beauty of the domestic life within the ancient walls, I may not speak here. But the story of house and estate belongs to a country that should cherish jealously the record of the few families and residences which have withstood the wash of Time and Change, agencies that relegate the fair fashion of growing old gracefully to a place among the lost arts.

II

THE

as 1622.

WESTOVER

HE Plantation of Westover finds place in the annals of Colonial History as early The original grant was made to Sir John Paulet. Theodorick Bland was the next owner. An Englishman by birth, he was a Spanish merchant before he emigrated to Virginia in 1654. He was one of the King's Council in Virginia, established himself at Westover, gave ten acres of land, a court-house and a prison to Charles City County, and built a church for the parish which occupied a portion of the graveyard on his plantation. He was buried in the chancel. A sunken horizontal slab, bearing his name, marks the site of the sacred edifice.

The estate came into prominence under the régime of the Byrds. Hening, in his Statutes

at Large, spells the name, Bird. Family tradition claims descent for them from a Le Brid, who entered England in

the train of William the Conqueror, and it transmits an ancient ballad, beginning,

"My father from the Norman shore,

With Royal William came."

The first American Byrd-William-was born in London in 1653, and settled in Virginia as merchant and planter in 1674. He bought Westover from the Blands, and died there in 1704. He held the office of ReceiverGeneral of the Royal Revenues at the time of his death. His son, William Evelyn Byrd, succeeded to the proprietorship when thirty years of age, having been born March 28, 1674. Two years later he married a daughter of Daniel Parke (see Lower Brandon). She died in England of smallpox in 1716, leaving two daughters, Evelyn, who never married, and Wilhelmina, who became the wife of Mr. William Chamberlayne, of Virginia.