[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?

Indeed, are these timepieces of sun and shadow made at all, or do they just occur here and there like hoary rocks and mossy springs?  And what a charming provision of Nature it is that they so often occur in gardens!  Sun-dials and gardens!  Sunshine-and-shadow time for plants to grow by; sunshine-and-shadow time for flowers to bloom by.  Surely this is the only time by which a morning-glory should waken, by which a four-o’clock should know its hour, by which an evening primrose should time its fragrant bloom.

Sun-dials and gardens!  Sunshine-and-shadow time for birds to sing by; sunshine-and-shadow time for mortals to laze and dream by.  Beautiful, silent, peaceful time; where no clocks strike the passing hours, no whistles scream the round of toil.  What time like that of the noiseless, scarce-moving shadow upon the dial for a sleepy old garden and a day-dreamer in the sunshine?  And if, perchance, the garden-lover is not building castles in Spain, but has crept into the garden only for brief rest from the fray, or to give a weary clock-driven soul an hour with its Maker, then truly again—­sun-dials and gardens!  Sun-dial time to rest the fainting heart by; sun-dial time for the troubled soul to reach up to God by.  Sun-dials and gardens!

Be the garden-lover what he may—­day-dreamer, fainting heart, troubled soul—­how gently the shadow-finger on the dial points the time for him!  How softly, almost lingeringly, it lets the moments slip from gold to gray, seeking to give him, to the full and unfretted, his little hour in the sunshine!