Turning from the gateway, we went down the old courtyard. We followed a walk that led past the kitchen and the dairy, skirted a wall, and then turned through a box-shaded gateway into the garden. Those December days were not the season of gardens, even in Virginia. The paths led us not where bloom was, but where bloom had been. Yet, truly all times are garden times where warm red walls shut you in with shadowing trees and shrubs, and where ancient box and ivy hedge the prim old ways. How much our colonial forefathers thought of their gardens! and how much their English forefathers thought of theirs! It was in the blood to have a garden, and to have it walled, and to sit and to walk and to talk in it. [Illustration: THE COLONIAL COURTYARD GATES.] Walking and talking that day with Westover's mistress in Westover's garden, we soon came upon the tomb of the noted William Byrd. Representative as was this master of Westover of all that was most elegant in the colonial life of his day, he was much more than merely a man of the fashionable world. Ability of a high order went with the beauty and the ruffles and the powder. He was statesman, scholar, and author; and in England he had been made, for his proficiency in science, a fellow of the Royal Society. [Illustration: TOMB OF COLONEL WILLIAM BYRD.] We owe a great deal to this old-time grandee for the glimpses his writings give us of colonial life in the South during the generation just preceding that of Washington. Unlike the Northern colonists, the Southern ones left little record of themselves. So much the more valuable, then, the accounts given by this remarkable man of the times. We seemed turning from an impressive text as we left the tomb; left the old grand seignior in his little six feet of earth--six feet out of 175,000 acres! But, after all, it was a rueful text; not one for morning sunshine and blue sky, for hearts that yet beat strong, that yet gloried in a boundless estate--all the bright world ours. And the birds were holding carnival over by the stone basin under the ram's head on the wall; and the river was dancing in the sunlight; and besides, we had caught sight of a sun-dial there in that old colonial garden by the banks of the "King's River"! To he sure we were told that this was not an ancient timepiece of the sun. We were much too late to see the original sun-dial of this garden. That old colonial worthy had found time too long for its marking. Worn with the years that it had told, it had leaned and dozed, and lost count, and was gone. But it is not so much that a garden should have an _old_ sun-dial, as that it should have a sun-dial. For the matter of that, they are all old. Venerableness is their birthright. Whoever thinks of youth in a sun-dial? Were you unboxing one just from the maker would you not expect to find it moss-grown?