At The Blind, Havre de Grace, on the Chesapeake, is a charming and typically Southern garden with ancient Box hedges for a background, and filled with the bloom of many old-fashioned hardy plants and shrubs. The property of two hundred acres is partly under cultivation and partly covered with Holly and ancient trees. Around the gray stone mansion in springtime the place is like a fairy-land, with hundreds of blossoming shrubs and fruit trees. Originally the land belonged to the Stumpp family, who acquired it by grant from one of the early English governors. It is now in the possession of a New Yorker, who keeps it as a shooting-preserve and stock-farm. [Illustration: PLATE VII A rock garden] [Illustration: PLATE VIII A rock garden Roland Park, Baltimore, Md. Mrs. Edward Bouton _After autochrome photographs_] [Illustration: PLATE 99 "Hampton," Towson, Md. Mrs. John Ridgely _From a photograph by Laurence H. Fowler_] [Illustration: PLATE 100 "Evergreen-on-Avenue," Baltimore, Md. Mrs. T. Harrison Garrett _From a photograph by Christhill Studio_] [Illustration: PLATE 101 "Cylburn House," Cylburn, Baltimore Co., Md. Mrs. Bruce Cotten _From a photograph by Art View Co._] [Illustration: PLATE 102 "Ingleside," Catonsville, Md. Mrs. A. C. Ritchie] [Illustration: PLATE 103 "The Blind," Havre de Grace, Md. James Lawrence Breese, Esq.] VIII VIRGINIA Virginia was the first of the States to adopt a luxurious mode of living. Its early men and women, so recently English, were not many of them of the strictly Puritan type, but rather the ease and pleasure loving class, and shortly their fertile plantations, developed by countless slaves, yielded rich results, and Virginia, followed soon by the neighboring States, became famous for homes and gardens on an extensive scale. One of the earliest and best of these estates was Mount Vernon, so well preserved and yet so familiar as not to need an introduction or even a space in this book. Brandon, Westover, Shirley, Berkeley, Castle Hill, and others on the River James, as well as some of the splendid places in the "hill country," have been renovated in recent years and should be considered among the treasures of America.