dark," and there the immortal "B'rer Rabbit" appears, but not for the first time, in the annals of colonial history, and her Serene Highness, the "Tar Baby," held her nightly court. Around the winter fireside in the old colonial houses, the children, and their seniors as well, learned the folk-lore of their native colony, for, young as was the new country, Virginia had already her legends: the mystic light on the lake in the Dismal Swamp, where the lost lovers paddled their ghostly canoe; the footprints of the Great Spirit on the rocks near Richmond; the story of Maiden's Adventure on the James River; the story of the Haunted House--the untenanted mansion at Church Hill--untenanted for eight decades because the unhappy spirit of a maiden tapped with her fan on the doors where wedded couples slept, invoking curses upon love that had failed her; of sweet Evelyn Byrd, who rested not under her monument at Westover, but glided among the roses, wringing her hands in hopeless grief for the loss of a mortal's love; and of the legend of the wonderful curative spring just discovered in Greenbrier County (learned from an old Indian of the tribe of the Shawnees)--how one of the great braves had once been missed from the council-fires and been found in a valley, weak and supine, binding the brows of an Indian maid with ferns and flowers; how two arrows had sped by order of the Great Spirit, one destined for the man, one for the maid; how the recreant warrior had been slain by the one, but the other arrow had buried itself in the earth and when withdrawn a great, white sulphur spring had gushed forth; how the maiden was doomed to wander as long as the stream flowed, and not until it ceased could her spirit be reunited to that of her lover in the happy hunting-grounds; also how the body of the slain warrior was laid towards the setting sun, and the form of the sleeping giant might be clearly discerned despite the trees that grew over it. [Illustration: WESTOVER.]