courtyard. We followed a
walk that led past the kitchen and the dairy, skirted a wall, and then
turned through a box-shaded gateway into the garden.

Those December days were not the season of gardens, even in Virginia.
The paths led us not where bloom was, but where bloom had been. Yet,
truly all times are garden times where warm red walls shut you in with
shadowing trees and shrubs, and where ancient box and ivy hedge the
prim old ways.

How much our colonial forefathers thought of their gardens! and how
much their English forefathers thought of theirs! It was in the blood
to have a garden, and to have it walled, and to sit and to walk and to
talk in it.

[Illustration: THE COLONIAL COURTYARD GATES.]

Walking and talking that day with Westover's mistress in Westover's
garden, we soon came upon the tomb of the noted William Byrd.
Representative as was this master of Westover of all that was most
elegant in the colonial life of his day, he was much more than merely a
man of the fashionable world. Ability of a high order went with the
beauty and the ruffles and the powder. He was statesman, scholar, and
author; and in England he had been made, for his proficiency in
science, a fellow of the Royal Society.

[Illustration: TOMB OF COLONEL WILLIAM BYRD.]

We owe a great deal to this old-time grandee for the glimpses his
writings give us of colonial life in the South during the generation
just preceding that of Washington. Unlike the Northern colonists, the
Southern ones left little record of themselves. So much the more
valuable, then, the accounts given by this remarkable man of the times.

We seemed turning from an impressive text as we left the tomb; left the
old grand seignior in his little six feet of earth--six feet out of
175,000 acres! But, after all, it was a rueful text; not one for
morning sunshine and blue sky, for hearts that yet beat strong, that
yet gloried in a boundless estate--all the bright world ours. And the
birds were holding carnival over by the stone basin under the ram's
head on the wall; and the river was dancing in the sunlight; and
besides, we had caught sight of a sun-dial there in that old colonial
garden by the banks of the "King's River"! To he sure we were told that
this was not an ancient timepiece of the sun. We were much too late to
see the original sun-dial of this garden. That old colonial worthy had
found time too long for its marking. Worn with the years that it had
told, i