How far removed Westover was from the day of such things, is shown by the noted mantelpiece in the drawing-room.  Only with the coming of smaller fireplaces came those elaborate mantelpieces.  But the great fireplaces of our ancestors yielded slowly, inch by inch, as it were; and something of the goodly proportions they yet had in Colonel Byrd’s day, the hammer and chisel have shown at Westover.

If the exquisite Colonel’s doubtless exquisite ghost haunts this home, we can imagine his pleasure when, one wintry night, he found reopened this fine old library fireplace, and sat him down to toast his shapely calves (even ghostly, they must yet be shapely) in the genial old-time glow.

Some of the most interesting features of the work of putting an old homestead back into a period from which it has strayed, grow out of the very limitations.  At Westover, while conformity to colonial times is carried far, even to the exclusion of rocking-chairs, yet there has been no shrinking from anachronisms that comfort or convenience demand.

Eighteenth century fireplaces may blaze and crackle, and quite imagine themselves to be still heating the old house; but somewhere down below is a twentieth century furnace that is quietly doing most of the work.

[Illustration:  The drawing-room mantelpiece at Westover.]

And what a shock it must be to the colonial ghosts when they stumble in the dark over great claw feet, cold even as their own; the feet of monstrous hollow things, white and awesome as themselves—­the things that moderns call bathtubs!

Over in the kitchen, unfortunately for the picturesque, all has to be modern.  There the eighteenth century furnishing breaks down altogether.  Not from the glowing heart of the old chimney-place, but from a huge, homely range comes the gastronomic hospitality of present-day Westover.

No devotion to the eighteenth century can bring the colonial kitchen back again; send the roaring blaze up the wide chimney; swing the crane with the great kettle into the glow; and rebuild the quaint row of skillet and gridiron and broiler, perched on their little legs over the hot embers of the old hearthstone.

Westover has an interesting reminder of the colonial in a copy of an old survey of the plantation that we saw that day.  Our eyes quickly caught the suggestive name given on the map to the low, sandy point at the mouth of Herring Creek, where we had left our shore-boat to wait for us.  We had not known that it was a place of such associations as the words “Ducking-stool Point” indicated.