Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

i68 ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
ground; the lovely shade trees had disappeared, and we three,
Brother Joe and Alvah and I, were walking over this place so
alive to every memory of our earlier days. As we looked
about us for familiar and remembered sights, a young cadet
came forward and offered to show us over the grounds. We
told him something of what the place had meant to us in our
youth and of the grand work done by Farmers' College in
antebellum days.
Once again we walked up the stone steps — two pilgrims
with snow-white hair and steps a little measured as the elastic-
ity of youth had departed. We found the chapel dismantled,
but still there were the picture of Freeman Cary and the life-
size portrait of Dr. Bishop. The rostrum was there, but silent
and deserted was the place where Madame Rive's music class
had stood and filled the air with sweet sound. I seemed all
at once to see the emptiness there peopled with those lovely
girls as they appeared on great occasions. They passed before
our fancy arrayed in white, with garlands of rose leaves fastened
together to imitate the Grecian Muses. What a picture of
classical beauty they made in thin flowing robes with those
garlands of green on their white brows, and now they are but
a dream, a memory! We stood a while longer in front of that
stage and called up in grand review the scenes the place brought
so vividly to mind — they came and disappeared again from
sight, phantoms of what had been so long ago engulfed in the
ever-rolling tide of time.
The Civil War seems to have had a part in the downfall
of this work so prosperously begun. We walked over Freeman
Cary's beautiful grounds and looked upon the palatial home he
built; upon the landscape garden once the admiration of my
youth; and while yet beautiful, all showed that Time had
touched them and would eventually conquer, which is the
destiny of the proudest monuments of earth.
While wandering along the paths of our youth, I inquired
of a guide for the Cary sisters' old home, for I remembered
"the brown old homestead" as it used to rear its walls "from
the village dust aloof." Its picture was imprinted upon my
childhood memory. As I recall it now, it stood on the maca-