se two fell in love--the daughter of
"the baron of the James" and the grandson and heir of London's social
leader, Lord Peterborough.

It seemed a pretty knot of Cupid's tying; but just here William Byrd
cast himself in the role of Fate. Some say because of religious
differences, some say because of an old family feud, he refused to
permit the marriage. He brought his daughter back to Virginia where, as
the old records say, "refusing all offers from other gentlemen, she
died of a broken heart."

That day when we left the manor-house, we started homeward, or
boatward, with our faces set the wrong way; for we wandered first into
the old garden.

It is a typical colonial garden that lies down by the river--a great
roomy garden where trees and fruit bushes stand among the blossoming
shrubs and vines and plants. It is a garden to wander in, to sit in, to
dream in. All is very quiet here and the world seems a great way off.
Only the birds come to share the beauty with you, and their singing
seems a part of the very peace and quiet of it all. The old-fashioned
flowers are set out in the old-fashioned way. There are (or once were)
the prim squares, each with its cowslip border, and the stiffly regular
little hedgerows. One may hunt them all out now; but for so many
generations have shrub and vine and plant lived together here, that a
good deal of formality has been dispensed with, and across old lines
bloom mingles with bloom.

The old garden calendars the seasons as they come and go. As an early
blossom fades, a later one takes its place through all the flowery way
from crocus to aster.

Trifling, cold, and unfriendly seem most gardens of to-day in
comparison with these old-fashioned ones. Perhaps the entire display in
the modern garden comes fresh from the florist in the spring, and is
allowed to die out in the fall, to be replaced the next spring by
plants not only new but even of different varieties from those of the
year before. Not so at Brandon. Here, the garden is one of exclusive
old families. Its flower people can trace their pedigrees back to the
floral emigrants from England. The young plants that may replace some
dead ones are scions of the old stock. Strange blossoms, changing every
spring like dwellers in a city flat, would not be in good standing with
the blue flags that great- (many times great-) grandmother planted, nor
with the venerable peonies and day lilies, the lilacs and syringas that
remember the