hbours there. She came, a passing
stranger, upon her husband's trading ship; a ship that would anchor but
to exchange its English wares for the planter's tobacco, and then turn
prow again to the perils of the sea. When illness came in the new, wild
land, how distant must have seemed Aberdeenshire in those days of the
little ship and the slow sail! And here, longing for one more sight of
Scottish heather, this Elizabeth died.

Seeking for her a last resting-place, the stranger ship moved up the
river and came to anchor at the mouth of this creek. They lowered her
gently over the ship's side into a long-boat and then rowed up the
stream into the forest. Here by the creek's side they buried her, and
(doubtless by the ship's own compass) they orientated the forest grave.
Then again the ship sailed across seas and bore sad tidings to some
family of Gordons in Aberdeenshire.

In those days it must have been long before the returning vessel could
sail up the James, this time bearing the graven tomb from Scotland. For
a little while, the stillness of the forest was once more broken,
startling the timid woodland folk; and then these strangers from
overseas were gone. Again the great silence fell and the wilderness
took the grave to itself. Slowly it set upon the tomb its seal of moss
and lichen and vine. Unmindful of the mark of human loss and grief, the
wild folk came and went. Joyously the cardinal flashed his crimson wing
above the darkening stone; the deer came to drink from the stream and
lifted their heads to scent the breeze that came with the dawn through
the cypress trees, across a forgotten grave; hard and incurious, the
Weyanoke Indians slipped by like darker shadows in the forest gloom;
and only the little night birds seemed to know or to care as they
called plaintively in the marshes at twilight.

As we were about to leave the tomb, we bethought us that the
anniversary of the death of this Elizabeth was drawing near. We heaped
the holly with its glowing berries above the crumbling stone. And still
we lingered; for the Gordons of Tilliangus seemed very far away from
this daughter of their house. As the sunset lights were fading, we saw
a new moon pale on the tinted sky; and we thought of how for almost two
centuries crescent moons had trembled from silver to gold above this
forlorn grave on the bank of the Kittewan.

A short row in the dusk out upon the stream, and we stepped aboard
Gadabout. She never seemed mor