Then, instead of taking that trail up the hill that leads only into a
cornfield, look for a path leading to the left through the woods. It is
not much of a path; and unless you love Nature in even her capricious
moods, when she now and then trips the foot of the unwary and mayhap
even scratches, it is too bad after all that you came this way. To love
of Nature should be added a certain measure of agility, so that you
will be all right when you come to the fence. Fortunately, you can let
down the upper rails--being careful to put them back again when you are
safe on the other side.

Beyond the fence, a great pasture-field stretches away endlessly. But
then everything is on a large scale at Shirley. Ampleness is the
keynote; it pervades everything. Before you have half crossed the
field, you will come upon a road that will lead you to a little
eminence near the quarters.

No, it is not a village that you now see peeping out through the grove
over there by the river; it is the group of buildings constituting the
homestead of Shirley. In the bright sunlight, you can pick out bits of
the mansion through the trees, of the dairy, of the kitchen, and of the
smaller buildings; while farther out stand the roomy barns and the
quaint turreted dove-cote. All the buildings are of brick and show a
warm, dull red.

Time has left few such scenes as this--the completely equipped
home-acre of a great; seventeenth century American plantation. The
scene is not exactly a typical one; for few of such early colonial
estates, and indeed not many of the later ones, had homesteads as
complete, as substantially built, and on as large a scale as this of
Shirley.

Now, as you can need no further guidance, we are going off some two or
three hundred years into the past, to see if we can get hold of the
other end of the story of this plantation.

Perhaps the start was "about Christmas time" in the year 1611, when Sir
Thomas Dale, High Marshal of the Colony of Virginia, sailed up the
river from James Towne; killed or drove away all the Indians hereabout;
and then, thinking it ill that so much goodly land should be lying
unoccupied, took possession of a large tract of it for the colony. But
the part that came to be called Shirley is soon lost sight of in the
fogs of tradition. Later, we catch a glimpse of it in the possession of
Lord Delaware. But it is not until the middle of the seventeenth
century that we get a firm hold of this elusive colonial