In the days of the colonial Carters (who, through a complicated network of intermarriages, were cousins to all the rest of Virginia), Shirley must often have been full to overflowing. And, along with our thoughts of Shirley's hospitality, came the recollection of a pretty story that had been told to us one day at Brandon by Miss Mary Lee, daughter of General Robert E. Lee. It was a story of one of the merry, old-time gatherings about Charles Carter's long table in the Shirley dining-room. Among the guests was a dashing young cavalry officer who had won fame and the rank of general in the Revolutionary War; and who, in his unsatisfied military ardour, was contemplating joining the Revolutionary Army of France. But just now, he was contemplating only his host and his dinner. Suddenly, he became aware of a flushed and charming maiden in distress. She had lifted a great cut glass dish filled with strawberries, and it was more than her little hands could hold. She strove to avert a crash; and, just in time, the gallant young General caught the appealing look from the dark eyes and the toppling dish from the trembling hands. But in saving the bowl and the berries, he lost his heart. And the maiden was Anne Hill Carter, daughter of the genial host; and the young General was "Light Horse Harry" Lee. The dreams of further glory on French battlefields were abandoned; and there was another feast at Shirley when bridal roses of June were in bloom. The young people went to live at Stratford, the ancestral home of the Lees; and there was born their famous son, Robert E. Lee. As Shirley's old dining-room thus brought to our minds that greatest Virginian of our day, so it brought to mind the greatest Virginian of all days; for, even as we looked at silver and thought of love stories, a life-size portrait of George Washington, by Charles Wilson Peale, stood looking down upon us from the panelled wall. [Illustration: PEALE'S PORTRAIT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON.] It is a noted and invaluable canvas that hangs there at Shirley, and it is doubtless a good likeness of the Father of our Country; but it is not just the George Washington that most of us have in our mind's eye. When the average American thinks of hatchets and cherry trees and abnormal truthfulness, the face that rises before him is that benign and fatherly one that he has seen a thousand times in the popular reproductions of the portrait by Gilbert Stuart. Just as for generations only the good has been told of George Washington, so has this handsomest picture (doubtless a trifle flattering) always been the popular one. However, in this day, when the ideal George Washington of story is being ruthlessly brushed aside in the search for the real flesh-and-blood man, any canvas also that has idealized him is somewhat in jeopardy.