e great dining-room and there, in the good plantation way, it is
opened on the old mahogany.

The mail that morning made a very good directory of the present-day
family at Brandon. There were letters and packages for the mistress of
the plantation and for the daughter and the son living in the
manor-house with her, and also for the other daughter and her husband,
Mr. Randolph Cuyler, who live across the lawn in Brandon Cottage with
its dormer windows and wistaria-draped veranda. Mrs. Harrison is the
widow of Mr. George Evelyn Harrison, and the daughter of the late
William Washington Gordon, who was the first president of the Central
Railroad of Georgia and one of the most prominent men in that state.

[Illustration: "VENERABLE FOUR-POSTERS, RICHLY CARVED AND DARK."]

Brandon to-day keeps up correspondence with relatives and friends in
England and on the Continent, reads English papers and magazines, sends
cuttings from rosebushes and shrubs across seas, makes visits there and
is visited in turn. So, it was pleasant to have the reading of our own
welcome letters diversified by bits of foreign news that came out of
the bag for Brandon. We could imagine an expression of personal
interest on the handsome face of Colonel Byrd, as he stood in court
costume on the wall above us, when the wrappings were taken from a
volume containing the correspondence of his old friend, the Earl of
Orrery, and sent by the present Earl to Mrs. Harrison. In it were some
of the Colonel's letters written from his James River home, and in
which he spoke of how his daughters missed the gaieties of the English
Court. The torn wrappings and bits of string were gathered up and a
little blaze was made of them behind the old fire-dogs. Then we were
shown more of Brandon.

Up quaint staircases in the wings we went to the roomy bedrooms with
their ivy-cased windows, mellow-toned panelling, and old open
fireplaces. As daily living at Brandon is truly in the paths of
ancestral worthies, so, at night, there are venerable four-posters,
richly carved and dark, to induce eighteenth century dreams in the
twentieth century Harrisons. Massive mahogany wardrobes, bureaus, and
washstands are as generations of forebears have used them.

Some of the bedrooms once had small rooms opening off from them, one on
either side of the fireplace, each having a window. An English
kinswoman of the family says that such rooms were called "powdering
rooms." Through holes in th