about them, while here and there showed the sad-colored coat of a minister, or the broad face of some Walloon 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 or the York, the dealer to whom he was consigned, the officer of the Crown who had cried him for sale, the planter who had bought him, the divine who preached that he was of a race accursed,—­all were there, and all had interest in this merchandise.  Others in the throng talked of ships both great and small, and the quaintness of their names, the golden flowers and golden women, the swift birds and beasts,