just before the Revolution, she
was a reigning toast under the popular name of "Nancy Wilton." The
second Benjamin Harrison of Brandon was among her wooers; and it is to
his courtship that Thomas Jefferson refers when expressing, in one of
his letters, the hope that his old college roommate may have luck at
Wilton. He did have. And we remembered the sweet-faced portrait at
Brandon of "Nancy Wilton" Harrison.

[Illustration: FALLING CREEK.]

Soon, our course was along a narrow channel saw-toothed with jetties on
either hand. The signs of life upon the river told that we were nearing
Richmond. We passed some work-boats, tugs, dredges, and such craft, and
everybody whistled.

Over the top of a rise of land that marked the next bend of the river,
we saw an ugly dark cloud. It had been long since we had seen a cloud
like that; but there is no mistaking the black hat of a city.

So, there was Richmond seated beside the falls in the James--those
water-bars that the river would not let down for any ship to pass;
there was where our journey would end. To be sure, long years ago, the
pale-faces outwitted the old tawny Powhatan by building a canal around
its barriers. Their ships climbed great steps that they called locks;
and, passing around the falls and rapids, went up and on their way far
toward the mountains. But the river knew the ways of the white man, and
kept its water-bars up and waited.

After a while the pale-faces took to a new way of getting themselves
and their belongings over the country; they went rolling about on rails
instead of floating on the water; and before long, they almost forgot
the old waterways. Nature waited a while and then took their abandoned
canals to grow rushes and water-lilies; and she covered the tow-paths
with green and put tangles of undergrowth along; and then she gave it
all to the birds and the frogs and the turtles.

So, it came to pass that river barriers counted once more--that the
barrier across our river counted once more. We did not know whether the
canal ahead of us was wholly abandoned; but we did know that it was so
obstructed as to no longer furnish a way of getting a vessel above the
falls.

The Powhatan was master again; and a little way beyond that next bend
it would bar the progress of Gadabout just as, three centuries earlier,
it had barred the progress of the exploring boats that the first
settlers sent up from James Towne.

Well, it was high time anyway for our