Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in Lancashire; and the _Susan Constant_ landed the Jamestown settlers more than a dozen years before the _Mayflower_ landed her shipload of eminent furniture owners at Plymouth. Even Plymouth itself had been visited years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named the place. I find that some boys, to-day, know these things. But though that fact is encouraging, I am not writing for boys, but for their comparatively ignorant parents. Not only did the first English colony establish itself in Virginia, and the first known tobacco come from there--a point the importance of which cannot be overstated--but the history of the Old Dominion is in every way more romantic and heroic than that of any other State. The first popular government existed there long before the Revolution, and at the time of the break with the mother country Virginia was the most wealthy and populous of the Colonies. Some historians say that slavery was first introduced there when some Dutchmen sold to the colonists a shipload of negroes, but I believe this point is disputed. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, written by a Virginian, and made good by the sword of one. The first President of the United States was a Virginian, and so is the present Chief Executive. The whole of New England has produced but four presidents; Ohio has produced six; but Virginia has given us eight. The first British army to land on this continent (Braddock's) landed in Virginia, and in that State our two greatest wars were terminated by the surrenders of Cornwallis and of Lee. And, last, the gallant Lee himself was a Virginian of the Virginians--a son of the distinguished Henry Lee who said of Washington that he was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." * * * * * On the pleasant drive of perhaps a dozen miles, from Harper's Ferry to Charles Town, I noticed here and there, at the roadside, pyramidal stones, suggesting monuments, but bearing no inscription save that each had a number. On inquiry I learned that these were indeed Confederate monuments, but that to find out what they marked it was necessary to go to the county courthouse at Charles Town and look up the numbers in a book, of which there is but one copy. These monuments were set out three or four years ago. They appeared suddenly, almost as though they had grown overnight, and many people wondered, as I had, what they meant. "Eloise," one Charles Town young lady asked another, "what's that monument out in front of your house with the number twenty-one on it?" "Oh," replied Eloise, "that's where all my suitors are buried." * * * * *