den was Anne Hill Carter, daughter of the genial host; and
the young General was "Light Horse Harry" Lee. The dreams of further
glory on French battlefields were abandoned; and there was another
feast at Shirley when bridal roses of June were in bloom. The young
people went to live at Stratford, the ancestral home of the Lees; and
there was born their famous son, Robert E. Lee.

As Shirley's old dining-room thus brought to our minds that greatest
Virginian of our day, so it brought to mind the greatest Virginian of
all days; for, even as we looked at silver and thought of love stories,
a life-size portrait of George Washington, by Charles Wilson Peale,
stood looking down upon us from the panelled wall.

[Illustration: PEALE'S PORTRAIT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON.]

It is a noted and invaluable canvas that hangs there at Shirley, and it
is doubtless a good likeness of the Father of our Country; but it is
not just the George Washington that most of us have in our mind's eye.
When the average American thinks of hatchets and cherry trees and
abnormal truthfulness, the face that rises before him is that benign
and fatherly one that he has seen a thousand times in the popular
reproductions of the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Just as for
generations only the good has been told of George Washington, so has
this handsomest picture (doubtless a trifle flattering) always been the
popular one.

However, in this day, when the ideal George Washington of story is
being ruthlessly brushed aside in the search for the real
flesh-and-blood man, any canvas also that has idealized him is somewhat
in jeopardy.

It is well that the Washington of Sparks and of Irving and of Stuart
should be superseded by the truer Washington of Mitchell and of Ford
and of Peale; but the result will be that, for a while, the country
will scarcely recognize its own father.

Always at Shirley our interest came back to the old colonial hall. Of
course, to get the good of it, one had to set one's eyes so as to throw
out of focus many marks of modernism; but that adjustment would almost
come of itself with a little study of quaint transoms, or of ancient
hatchments, or, above all, of the time-worn stairway.

Why is it that the spirit of the long-ago so clings about an old
stairway? Why should the empty stair seem to remember so much, to
suggest so much, of a life that came to it only in fitful passings and
that left nothing of itself behind?

There were no signs o