[Illustration:  The hepplewhite sideboard with butler’s desk.]

In the dining-room our interest was quickened upon our being told that the handsome sideboard had belonged to the Byrd family.  It is believed to be a Hepplewhite, though similar in lines to a rare design of Sheraton’s.  Above the sideboard a circular, concave mirror of elaborate eighteenth century type accentuates the period furnishing of the room.

[Illustration:  “Four-posters and the things of four-poster days.”]

Up-stairs even more than below, we felt the atmosphere of the olden time.  Perhaps passing the ancient clock on the landing helped to set us back a century or two.  We were quite prepared for the quiet, old-fashioned upper hall, with its richness half lost in the shadows and with its sleepy night-stand holding a brass house lantern and a prim array of candles in brass candlesticks.

In the bedrooms were four-posters and the things of four-poster days.  Wing-cheek chairs of cozy depths told of old-time fireside dreams; a work-table with attenuated legs called to mind the wearisome needlework of our foremothers; and a brass warming-pan carried us back to the times when only such devices could make tolerable the frigid winter beds of our ancestors.

One of the riverward bedrooms is the romantic centre of Westover.  It now belongs to the little daughter of the house; but nearly two centuries ago it was the room of Evelyn Byrd.  Doubtless, in a sense, it will always be hers.  The soft toned panelled walls, the old fireplace opposite the door, and the cozy little dressing-room looking gardenward, all seem to speak of her; and the imaginative visitor can quite discern a graceful figure in colonial gown there in one of the deep window seats that look out upon the pleasance and the river.

Here the unfortunate colonial beauty lived and died with the grief that she brought from over the sea.  Here she laid away the rich brocade, the old court gown of brilliant, bitter memories that was shown to us at Brandon.  Through these windows she looked with ever more wistful eyes out upon the river, her thoughts hurrying with its waters toward the ocean and the lover beyond.  And one day, it is said, a great ship from London came, and it touched at the pier before her windows, and Charles Mordaunt plead his cause with the stern father once more.  But he plead in vain, and the ship and the lover sailed away.  For a while longer, the colonial girl waited and looked out upon the river, then she too went away and the romance was over.

[Illustration:  The romantic centre of Westover; Evelyn Byrd’s old room.]

In the family circle at Westover to-day are Mrs. Ramsay, two sons, and the little daughter, Elizabeth.  Among well-known families appearing in Mrs. Ramsay’s ancestry are the Sears and the Gardiners of Massachusetts, she being a descendant of Lyon Gardiner of Gardiner’s Island.  She also claims kinship with the Randolphs and the Reeveses of Virginia, and a collateral and remote connection with the Byrds.