n from Spotswood's
settlement on the Rapidan, or the keener countenances of Frenchmen from
Monacan-Town. The armorer from the Magazine elbowed a great proprietor
from the Eastern shore, while a famous guide and hunter, long and lean and
brown, described to a magnate of Yorktown a buffalo capture in the far
west, twenty leagues beyond the falls. Masters and scholars from William
and Mary were there, with rangers, traders, sailors ashore, small
planters, merchants, loquacious keepers of ordinaries, and with men, now
free and with a stake in the land, who had come there as indentured
servants, or as convicts, runaways, and fugitives from justice. In the
upper gallery, where no payment was exacted, many servants with a
sprinkling of favorite mulatto or mustee slaves; in the boxes the lustre
and sweep of damask and brocade, light laughter, silvery voices, the
flutter of fans; everywhere the vividness and animation of a strangely
compounded society, where the shadows were deep and the lights were high.

Nor did the conversation of so motley an assemblage lack a certain
pictorial quality, a somewhat fantastic opulence of reference and
allusion. Of what might its members speak while they waited for the
drawing aside of the piece of baize which hung between them and an
Oriental camp? There was the staple of their wealth, a broad-leafed plant,
the smoke of whose far-spread burning might have wrapped its native fields
in a perpetual haze as of Indian summer; and there was the warfare,
bequeathed from generation to generation, against the standing armies of
the forest, that subtle foe that slept not, retreated not, whose vanguard,
ever falling, ever showed unbroken ranks beyond. Trapper and trader and
ranger might tell of trails through the wilderness vast and hostile, of
canoes upon unknown waters, of beasts of prey, creatures screaming in the
night-time through the ebony woods. Of Indian villages, also, and of red
men who, in the fastnesses that were left them, took and tortured and slew
after strange fashions. The white man, strong as the wind, drove the red
man before his face like an autumn leaf, but he beckoned to the black man,
and the black man came at his call. He came in numbers from a far country,
and the manner of his coming was in chains. What he had to sell was
valuable, but the purchase price came not into his hands. Of him also
mention was made to-night. The master of the tall ship that had brought
him into the James