Barons of the Potomack and the Rappahannock #245452

Among the pretty legends of Spotswood that lingered on the Rappahannock, one related that he had sailed up the river on a ship made musical with English skylarks. He released these feathered colonists in the meadows, just below the Falls, in Spottsylvania, the county bearing his name. In childhood, daily passing those meadows on my way to school in Fredericksburg, how often did I hear those larks singing in the morning sunshine! But our elders used to smile incredulously at such tales, and the skylarks were heard more rarely in boyhood. When youth was reached they had all changed to mere meadow-larks. But no doubt other children continued to hear them until they were scared away by the hurtling shot and shell which left their happy homes desolate monuments of civil war.