Stranica 83 [83]
OCR
HrsToRIc) GARDENS! OO} MET RESZEN TA Byrd coach-and-six with the liveried outriders, when the Colonel and his ladies would go a-visiting to Shirley or Brandon or to Buckland. Then came the Revolution. Burgesses from Williamsburg and the first men of the colony, perhaps, sat on those benches and through the smoke of their long-stemmed clay pipes discussed the peril of the times. Officers of the Continental line, in buft and blue, strode the paths in shining jack-boots, or made love beneath the arbors to the beautiful Byrd girls. Westover knew Red Coats again, too, for Arnold, the renegade, stopped there in 1781, and a few months later Cornwallis crossed the river there, bound for Yorktown and his doom. To the gay French officers who took part in that siege, the fair chatelaine of Westover and her beautiful daughters were magnets, and their bright uniforms must have made even the roses pale. The Marquis de Chastellux claimed in his memoirs that Westover was the most beautiful place in America. The clouds of war passed and the only scarlet coats seen at Westover were those of fox hunters. Quiet fell again upon the garden, and how pleasant it is to recall the children who romped along the paths in charge of their old negro mammies! The garden rang with laughter and there was no thought of the darker days that were yet to come. | Westover was no longer in the wilderness. The Indians had vanished; the river had become a highway of commerce. Broad fields around smiled with rich crops and in the garden all was peace and happiness. Yet war was to come again and in more frightful guise. McClellan, on his retreat from Richmond, used the house for his headquarters, and the garden resounded to the clatter of arms. The fences were torn down, the flower beds trampled, the hedgerows broken; but McClellan passed, as Arnold and Cornwallis and the Indians had passed, and the garden remained to spring into new beauty. [50]
