handful of Poles and Germans, and several French vinedressers.

Political and economic life was taking form. That huge, luxurious,
thick-leafed, yellow-flowered crop, alike comforting and extravagant,
that tobacco that was in much to mould manners and customs and ways
of looking at things, was beginning to grow abundantly. In 1620, forty
thousand pounds of tobacco went from Virginia to England; two years
later went sixty thousand pounds. The best sold at two shillings the
pound, the inferior for eighteen pence. The Virginians dropped all
thought of sassafras and clapboard. Tobacco only had any flavor of
Golconda.

At this time the rich soil, composed of layer on layer of the decay of
forests that had lived from old time, was incredibly fertile. As fast as
trees could be felled and dragged away, in went the tobacco. Fields must
have laborers, nor did these need to be especially intelligent. Bring in
indentured men to work. Presently dream that ships, English as well as
Dutch, might oftener load in Africa and sell in Virginia, to furnish the
dark fields with dark workers! In Dale's time had begun the making over
of land in fee simple; in Yeardley's time every "ancient" colonist--that
is every man who had come to Virginia before 1616--was given a goodly
number of acres subject to a quit-rent. Men of means and influence
obtained great holdings; ownership, rental, sale, and purchase of the
land began in Virginia much as in older times it had begun in England.
Only here, in America, where it seemed that the land could never be
exhausted, individual holdings were often of great acreage. Thus arose
the Virginia Planter.

In Yeardley's time John Berkeley established at Falling Creek the first
iron works ever set up in English-America. There were by this time in
Virginia, glass works, a windmill, iron works. To till the soil remained
the chief industry, but the tobacco culture grew until it overshadowed
the maize and wheat, the pease and beans. There were cattle and swine,
not a few horses, poultry, pigeons, and peacocks.

In 1621 Yeardley, desiring to be relieved, was succeeded by Sir Francis
Wyatt. In October the new Governor came from England in the George, and
with him a goodly company. Among others is found George Sandys, brother
of Sir Edwyn. This gentleman and scholar, beneath Virginia skies
and with Virginia trees and blossoms about him, translated the
"Metamorphoses" of Ovid and the First Book of the "Aeneid", both o