ow and worn, but from their very age a little awesome
too.

The most valued one of them all is the original grant of Martin's
Brandon bearing date 1616--four years before the Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth. The grant covers a page and a half of the large sheets of
heavy parchment, and the ink is a stronger black than that on records a
century younger.

[Illustration: TREASURED PARCHMENTS, INCLUDING THE ORIGINAL GRANT OF
1616.]

On a worn paper dated 1702 is a plat of Brandon plantation. It shows
that at that time the central portion of the manor-house had not been
built as only two disconnected buildings (the present wings) are given.
A part of the sketch is marked "a corner of the garden." So, for two
hundred years (and who knows how much longer?) there has been that
garden by the river. Off at one side of the old map, we found our
landing-place in the woods beside some wavy lines that, a neat clerkly
hand informed us in pale brown ink, were the "meanderings of Chippoak
Creek."

Poring so intently over those ancient papers with their great Old
English capitals, their stiff flourishes, their quaint abbreviations,
we should scarcely have been startled to see a peruked head bend above
them and a hand with noisy quill go tracing along the lines of those
long-ago "Whereases" and "Be it knowns."

But, instead, something quite different came out of the past: something
very soft and feminine fell over the blotched old papers--the treasured
silk brocade in which Evelyn Byrd was presented at the Court of George
I. Like a shadowy passing of that famous colonial belle, was the sweep
of the faint-flowered gown. A fabric of the patch-and-powder days is
this, with embroidered flowers in old blues and pinks clustered on its
deep cream ground. Its fashioning is quaint: the Watteau pleat in the
back with tiny tucks each side at the slim waist line, the square low
neck, the close elbow sleeves, the open front to display the quilted
petticoat.

Mingled feelings rise at sight of the soft brocade whose bodice once
throbbed with the happy heartbeats of this Virginia maiden, making
pretty curtsy in rosy pleasure, the admiration of the English Court.
Perhaps in this very gown she danced the stately minuet with young
Charles Mordaunt; perhaps hid beneath its fluttering laces his first
love sonnet. So, in those far colonial days it knew the life of her.
The grace of the young body seems still to linger in the pale,
shimmering folds; and th