we must study them as the "Autocrat" tells us we should all be studied, for at least a century before birth. The Colonial Cavalier must be painted, like a Rembrandt, with high lights and deep shadows. It is idle to ignore his weaknesses or his vices. They are of the kind that insist on notice. Yet, with all his faults, he will surely prove well worth our serious consideration, and however wide we open our eyes to his defects, however we seek to brush away the illusions with which tinsel hero-worship has surrounded him, we shall still find him, judged as he has a right to be, at his best, closely approaching Lowell's definition of a gentleman: "A man of culture, a man of intellectual resources, a man of public spirit, a man of refinement, with that good taste which is the conscience of the mind, and that conscience which is the good taste of the soul." This little volume makes no pretensions to the dignity of a history. It aims only, through local gossip and homely details of life and customs, to open a side-door, through which we may, perchance, gain a sense of fireside intimacy with _The Colonial Cavalier_. His Home [Illustration: The Colonial Cavalier His Home] I stood in the wide hall of the old brick mansion built, a century and a half ago, by "King Carter," on the shore of the James River. It was Autumn. The doors at either end of the saloon were open, and their casements framed the landscape like a picture. From the foot of the moss-grown steps at the rear, the drive stretched its length, under several closed gates, for half a mile, till it joined the little travelled high-road. From the porch in front, the ground fell away, in what had once been a series of terraces, to the brink of the river, across whose western hills the November sun was setting red. Not a ripple stirred the surface of the water--the dead leaves on the ground never rustled. All was still; solitary, yet not melancholy. The place seemed apart from the present--a part of the past. Within doors, everything was mellowed by the softening touch of twilight and age. The hospitable fire which blazed in the great throat of the library chimney, cast odd shadows on the high wainscot, and the delicately wrought mouldings over the chimney-breast, and its reflections danced in the small panes of the heavily framed windows as though the witches were making tea outside.