dit of Norfolk be it said that old St. Paul's Church, with its
picturesque churchyard and tombs, is excellently cared for and properly
valued as a pre-Revolutionary relic. The church was built in 1730, and
was struck by a British cannon-ball when Lord Dunmore bombarded the
place in 1776. Baedeker tells me, however, that the cannon-ball now
resting in the indentation in the wall of the church is "not the
original."

When I say that St. Paul's is properly valued I mean that many citizens
told my companion and me to be sure to visit. I observe, however--and I
take it as a sign of the times in Norfolk--that an extensive,
well-printed and much illustrated book on Norfolk, issued by the Chamber
of Commerce, contains pictures of banks, docks, breweries, mills, office
buildings, truck farms, peanut farms, battleships, clubhouses, hotels,
hospitals, factories, and innumerable new residences, but no picture of
the church, or of the lovely old homes of Freemason Street. Nor do I
find in the booklet any mention of the history of the city or the
surrounding region--although that region includes places of the greatest
beauty and interest: among them the glorious old manor houses of the
James River; the ancient and charming town of Williamsburg, second
capital of the Virginia colony, and seat of William and Mary College,
the oldest college in the United States excepting Harvard; Yorktown,
"Waterloo of the Revolution"; many important battlefields of the Civil
War; Hampton Institute, the famous negro industrial school at Hampton,
nearby; the lovely stretch of water on which the _Monitor_ met the
_Merrimac_[3]; the site of the first English settlement in America at
Jamestown, and, for mystery and desolation, the Dismal Swamp with Lake
Drummond at its heart. But then, I suppose it is natural that the
Chamber of Commerce mind should thrust aside such things in favor of the
mighty "goober," which is a thing of to-day, a thing for which Norfolk
is said to be the greatest of all markets. For is not history dead, and
is not the man who made a fortune out of a device for shelling peanuts
without causing the nuts to drop in two, still living?

[3] The _Merrimac_, originally a Federal vessel of wooden construction,
was sunk by the Union forces when they abandoned Norfolk. A Confederate
captain, John M. Brooke, raised her, equipped her with a ram, and
covered her with boiler plate and railroad rails. She is called the
first ironclad. While she wa