onology, and to have determined that these fine
prerevolutionary birds were not entitled to any immunity as national
emblems nor even as kinsfolk of "Old Abe." And so their tough feathers
flattened many a bullet, and one eagle had to be sent to Richmond to
get some toes and a new tail.

Turning from the gates, your eyes follow down the courtyard toward the
garden. Walls, outbuildings, the quaint cellar-hut, even the
diamond-shaped stepping-stones along the way, all help to make up a
characteristic colonial scene.

And for what striking bits of colonial life has this old courtyard been
the setting! Now the exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the
little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his
"lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the
great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in
chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay
gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting
them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and
wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with
scarlet-coated horsemen and baying hounds and hurrying black boys and
all that goes to

"Proclaim a hunting-morning."

When the ancient courtyard is left empty again--the colonial coaches
rolled off through the gates; the colonial huntsmen up and away and now
but distant points of red, fading to the music of hounds and horns--we
fall to wondering about those early Virginians.

Such, largely, was their life--abundant leisure, elegant display,
exuberant merrymaking. Just such a life, by all the rules, as would
produce a useless race devoid of any solidity of mind or of character.
Just such a life as in fact produced a race of high-minded, intelligent,
and capable men; a race that gave us Washington, Jefferson, Henry,
Madison, Marshall, Monroe, and the scarcely lesser names on down the
long list of those wonderful sons of the Old Dominion.

It would do no good to ask even that colonial courtyard for an
explanation of all this. It simply recalled what it had seen and heard.
Nor could we of to-day understand the explanation were we to get it.
Unable to reconcile industry and leisure, we underrate the real work
that went with the idling of those early Virginians; and as to the
gayety, we long ago lost sight of the fact that merrymaking is
man-making.

Turning from the gateway, we went down the old