Two great birds standing on stone balls top the gate-posts. With a fine disregard of both ornithology and heraldry these birds have often been spoken of as martlets--the martlet appearing in the Byrd coat of arms. They are evidently eagles, and pretty well developed specimens. American eagles, we might call them, if they had not lighted upon these gate-posts before the American nation adopted its emblem--indeed before the American nation was born. When, in the days of the Civil War, the Federal troops came along, the soldiers seem to have stood strictly upon chronology, and to have determined that these fine prerevolutionary birds were not entitled to any immunity as national emblems nor even as kinsfolk of "Old Abe." And so their tough feathers flattened many a bullet, and one eagle had to be sent to Richmond to get some toes and a new tail. Turning from the gates, your eyes follow down the courtyard toward the garden. Walls, outbuildings, the quaint cellar-hut, even the diamond-shaped stepping-stones along the way, all help to make up a characteristic colonial scene. And for what striking bits of colonial life has this old courtyard been the setting! Now the exquisite Colonel and his ladies would visit the little capital of Williamsburg; so, at his door, stands ready his "lordly coach and six with liveried outriders in waiting." Again, the great gates are thrown open to guests arriving on horseback and in chariots and chairs. Pompous, beruffled dignitaries vie with gay gallants in obeisances and compliments to the ladies, and in assisting them to alight without harm to brocades and laces and rich cloaks and wide-hooped petticoats. And, yet again, all is a-bustle here with scarlet-coated horsemen and baying hounds and hurrying black boys and all that goes to "Proclaim a hunting-morning." When the ancient courtyard is left empty again--the colonial coaches rolled off through the gates; the colonial huntsmen up and away and now but distant points of red, fading to the music of hounds and horns--we fall to wondering about those early Virginians. Such, largely, was their life--abundant leisure, elegant display, exuberant merrymaking. Just such a life, by all the rules, as would produce a useless race devoid of any solidity of mind or of character. Just such a life as in fact produced a race of high-minded, intelligent, and capable men; a race that gave us Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, Marshall, Monroe, and the scarcely lesser names on down the long list of those wonderful sons of the Old Dominion. It would do no good to ask even that colonial courtyard for an explanation of all this. It simply recalled what it had seen and heard. Nor could we of to-day understand the explanation were we to get it. Unable to reconcile industry and leisure, we underrate the real work that went with the idling of those early Virginians; and as to the gayety, we long ago lost sight of the fact that merrymaking is man-making.