Throwing on our heavy wraps and trying to throw off our heavy spirits, we went above and paced the deck.  In mockery our flags rippled under the northwest wind; from our flower-boxes, leafless, shrivelled little arms were held up to us; while our bright striped awning, with all its associations of sunshine and summer-time, was close furled and frozen stiff and hung with icicles.

We were surprised enough when the weather suddenly changed again, and the bright, warm sun set up such a thawing as soon sent the ice out of the creek and our anxieties with it.  But no time was to be lost in getting away from that beautiful, treacherous stream.  We should make one more visit to Shirley and then head again up river.  But that last visit should be a quite conventional one; we should run the houseboat around to the regular steamboat pier in front of the old manor-house.

It was a warm, hazy afternoon down in Eppes Creek when we untied our ropes from the trees (cast them off, we ought to say), and Gadabout pulled her nose from the reedy bank and slowly backed out into the stream.  She was obeying every turn of the steering-wheel perfectly (as indeed she always did except when the mischievous wind put notions into her head); and it was not her fault at all when her bow swung round under the tree that leaned out over the water and almost knocked her little chimney off.  We dropped down the stream and passed out into the river where everything was softened and beautified by the light fog.

Skirting the low northern shore, we looked across the river at the high southern one where, through the mist, we could see the town of City Point and the bold promontory that marked where the Appomattox was flowing into the James.  Upon the tip of the promontory was the home of the Eppes family, “Appomattox.”  While the present house is not a colonial one, the estate is one of the oldest in the country.

Now, just ahead of us was the Shirley pier on one side of the river and the village of Bermuda Hundred on the other.  We headed first for the village, our intention being to get some supplies there.

We could not see much of Bermuda Hundred, perhaps because there was not much to see.  It consists principally of age, having been founded only four years after the settlement of James Towne.  Still, we let the sailor go ashore for butter and eggs, trusting that both would be as modern as possible.  Our supplies aboard, Gadabout quickly carried us across the river and landed us at Shirley.

[Illustration:  The kitchen building, fifty yards from the manor-house.]

In that last visit to the old home, we went across the quadrangle and into the kitchen building, with its cook-room on one side of the hall and its bake-room on the other.  Of course most of the colonial kitchen appointments had long since disappeared; but we were glad to see, in the stone-paved bake-room, the old-time brick ovens.  With their cavernous depths, they were quite an object lesson in early Virginia hospitality.