profitable farming. It was in their days that Briar Farm entered
upon its long career of prosperity, which still continued. The
Sieur Amadis died in his seventieth year, and by his own wish,
expressed in his "Last Will and Testament," was buried in a
sequestered spot on his own lands, under a stone slab which he had
himself fashioned, carving upon it his recumbent figure in the
costume of a knight, a cross upon his breast and a broken sword at
his side. His wife, though several years younger than himself,
only lived a twelve-month after him and was interred by his side.
Their resting-place was now walled off, planted thickly with
flowers, and held sacred by every succeeding heir to the farm as
the burial-place of the first Jocelyns. Steadily and in order, the
families springing from the parent tree of the French knight
Amadis had occupied Briar Farm in unbroken succession, and through
three centuries the property had been kept intact, none of its
possessions being dispersed and none of its land being sold. The
house was practically in the same sound condition as when the
Sieur Amadis fitted and furnished it for his own occupation,--
there was the same pewter, the same solid furniture, the same fine
tapestry, preserved by the careful mending of many hundreds of
needles worked by hands long ago mingled with the dust of the
grave, and, strange as it may seem to those who are only
acquainted with the flimsy manufactures of to-day, the same stout
hand-wrought linen, which, mended and replenished each year,
lasted so long because never washed by modern methods, but always
by hand in clear cold running water. There were presses full of
this linen, deliriously scented with lavender, and there were also
the spinning-wheels that had spun the flax and the hand-looms on
which the threads had been woven. These were witnesses to the days
when women, instead of gadding abroad, were happy to be at home--