Stranica 144 [144]
OCR
RICHMOND AND VICINITY Davis, Winnie and Mrs. Hayes felt it was their home when they made their visits to Richmond after Mr. Davis’ death. There Mr. Matthew Arnold visited, and a long list of ‘‘worthies,”’ never ending. My mother, the wife of the oldest son, lived in the wing room toward Jefferson Street, whilst her husband, a colonel in the Confederate Army, was at the front. In the dead of night, the rest of the family being in the second story, she often heard a disaffected slave passing coal and provisions out of the basement door under her room to the Northern sympathizers. But let us go through the house on to another old-fashioned porch, the east end of which was a charming greenhouse, and thence to the garden. In the writer’s memory it was the more formal terraced garden, at the end of which was a long line of maple trees, back of which a grape arbor extended the whole width of the garden, thus screening from the view of the house the stables, yards, etc., which opened on Main Street—on a much lower level than the garden. But to the child, that stable guarded so closely by old ‘‘Uncle’’ Sam, the coachman, held delights as interesting as the garden. The tuberoses, mignonette, heliotrope and, O, such tea roses! were beautiful, but the glamour of the big old landau, the victoria, the glittering silver-mounted harness, the spirited horses! To penetrate there spelled heaven to the childish mind. The accompanying picture only gives a poor view of one of the four terraces which formed the garden, and no idea of the long side lawn extending from Franklin to Main Street. But it does show some of the trees of the original garden—the lindens and the paulownias. This view was taken after the death of General Anderson and when the property had been sold to give way to the Jefferson Hotel. And the borders, etc., look in it little as they had under the care of my grandmother. One hears much now of the “‘Newport Pink” and such “‘novelties’” of these days. There used to be always planted there thick masses of geranium, just the [87]
