stucco or red brick which time had subdued to a delicate rust-colour; those imposing Doric columns, or quaint Georgian doorways; those grass-grown brick pavements, where old ladies in perpetual mourning gathered for leisurely gossip; those wrought-iron gates that never closed; those unshuttered windows, with small gleaming panes, which welcomed the passer-by in winter; or those gardens, steeped in the fragrance of mint and old-fashioned flowers, which allured the thirsty visitor in summer.  These things had vanished years ago; yet beneath the noisy commercial city the friendly village remained.  There were hours in the lavender-tinted twilights of spring, or on autumn afternoons, while the shadows quivered beneath the burnished leaves and the sunset glowed with the colour of apricots, when the watcher might catch a fleeting glimpse of the past.  It may have been the drop of dusk in the arched recess of a Colonial doorway; it may have been the faint sunshine on the ivy-grown corner of an old brick wall; it may have been the plaintive melody of a negro market-man in the street; or it may have been the first view of the Culpeper’s gray and white mansion; but, in one or all of these things, there were moments when the ghost of the buried village stirred and looked out, and a fragrance that was like the memory of box and mint and blush roses stole into the senses.  It was then that one turned to the Doric columns of the Culpeper house, standing firmly established in its grassy lawn above the street and the age, and reflected that the defeated spirit of tradition had entrenched itself well at the last.  Time had been powerless against that fortress of prejudice; against that cheerful and inaccessible prison of the tribal instinct.  Poverty, the one indiscriminate leveller of men and principles, had never attacked it, for in the lean years of Reconstruction, when to look well fed was little short of a disgrace in Virginia, an English cousin, remote but clannish, had died at an opportune moment and left Mr. Randolph Byrd Culpeper a moderate fortune.  Thanks to this event, which Mrs. Culpeper gratefully classified as the “intervention of Providence,” the family had scarcely altered its manner of living in the last two hundred years.  To be sure there were modern discomforts which related to the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of whiskey; but since the Culpepers had been indulgent masters and light drinkers, they had come to regard these deprivations as in the nature of blessings.  Solid, imposing, and as richly endowed as an institution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both the restraints and the assaults of the centuries.  The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution.  Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was