summer in the sun's warm glow. The enervating
heat was over, and the worrisome insects were gone. In peace we could
sail in the marsh stream or climb the banks for ferns and holly.
Gadabout moved with masses of pale reeds, spicy boughs of cedar, bay
branches, and glowing holly nodding on her bow. The air was no longer
filled with the song of birds; but it was alive and cheerily a-twitter
with their fat flittings from seeds to berries, from marsh to woodland.
Heartily we declared that it was better to go an-Autumning than
a-Maying.

After a while there were signs of people about. Little boats were
nosing into the bank here and there, and occasionally a white farmhouse
would peep over the bluff above our water-trail.

[Illustration: "LITTLE BOATS WERE NOSING INTO THE BANK HERE AND
THERE."]

It was along toward dinner time when, according to our count, the
houseboat had rounded as many bends as the chart seemed to require, and
ought to be near Westover Church. So, upon catching sight through the
trees of a brick building up on the bluff, we concluded that Gadabout
had reached her journey's end, and an anchor was dropped.

Toward evening Nautica and the Commodore went ashore. At the top of the
hill was a little graveyard, and standing in it was the old church that
we had come to see. It was a small building and plain, but of historic
interest. As originally built, about the middle of the seventeenth
century, it stood not here but down on the shore of the James at
Westover. One of the earliest churches in the country, and then
standing on one of the greatest estates in Virginia, it was a typical
centre of colonial life; and gathered about it, in the little graveyard
by the river, were the tombs of noted colonial dead.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the church was moved to its
present site. Enclosed within a brick wall and with the tombs of
generations of worshippers again clustering about it, Westover Church
had settled down once more to revered old age when the ravages of war
swept over the land. In that sad war of brothers over a union that this
church had seen formed, over soil that it had seen won from Great
Britain, the humble old House of God was left dismantled, its graveyard
walls thrown down, and its tombs broken. After the war, the church was
repaired, and it is still the place of worship for the countryside.

The rectory stood on a bluff near by, overlooking the wide stretch of
marsh and the f