But when the snowy head above the dark, square shoulders tipped Old Lookout, the national emblem had it all to himself.  Occasionally he preened his feathers; but he did it in a bored, awkward way, as if forced on account of his valet’s absence into unfamiliar details of toilet quite beneath his dignity.  Now and then he would scream.  It is hard to believe that such a bird can have such a voice.  He always lost caste in our eyes when he had his little, choked-up penny whistle going.

The attractions of harbour life did not keep us away from the old manor-house.  Once when Gadabout ran around to the river front, she found a yacht from Philadelphia at the pier; and so passed on a little way and cast anchor in a cove opposite the garden.

Few other notable houses in America, still used as homes, are the objects of so many pilgrimages as the historic places on the James.  Indeed, few people but the hospitable Virginians would so frequently and so courteously fling wide their doors to strangers.

When the yachting visitors were gone that day and we were at the old home engrossed in the architecture of the Harrison colonial cradle, there came the long blasts of the steamer Pocahontas blowing for the Brandon landing.  Not that she had any passengers or freight for Brandon perhaps, or Brandon for her, but because all these river estates are postoffices and the Pocahontas carries the river mail.  After a considerable time (for even the United States mail moves slowly through the sleepy old garden), a coloured boy brought in a bag with most promising knobs and bulges all over it.

The postoffice at Brandon is over in the south wing where there are pigeon-holes and desks and such things.  But the family mail is brought into the great dining-room and there, in the good plantation way, it is opened on the old mahogany.

The mail that morning made a very good directory of the present-day family at Brandon.  There were letters and packages for the mistress of the plantation and for the daughter and the son living in the manor-house with her, and also for the other daughter and her husband, Mr. Randolph Cuyler, who live across the lawn in Brandon Cottage with its dormer windows and wistaria-draped veranda.  Mrs. Harrison is the widow of Mr. George Evelyn Harrison, and the daughter of the late William Washington Gordon, who was the first president of the Central Railroad of Georgia and one of the most prominent men in that state.

[Illustration:  “Venerable four-posters, richly carved and dark.”]