afar off, the King; and returned to Virginia and their plantations with the last but one novelty in ideas, manner, and dress.  Of their sons not a few were educated in English schools, while their wives and daughters, if for the most part they saw the enchanted ground only through the eyes of husband, father, or brother, yet followed its fashions, when learned, with religious zeal.  In Williamsburgh, where all men went on occasion, there was polite enough living:  there were the college, the Capitol, and the playhouse; the palace was a toy St. James; the Governors that came and went almost as proper gentlemen, fitted to rule over English people, as if they had been born in Hanover and could not speak their subjects’ tongue.

So it was that the assembly which had risen to greet Mr. Jaquelin’s latest guests, besides being sufficiently well born, was not at all ill bred, nor uninformed, nor untraveled.  But it was not of the gay world as were the three whom it welcomed.  It had spent only months, not years, in England; it had never kissed the King’s hand; it did not know Bath nor the Wells; it was innocent of drums and routs and masquerades; had not even a speaking acquaintance with great lords and ladies; had never supped with Pope, or been grimly smiled upon by the Dean of St. Patrick’s, or courted by the Earl of Peterborough.  It had not, like the elder of the two men, studied in the Low Countries, visited the Court of France, and contracted friendships with men of illustrious names; nor, like the younger, had it written a play that ran for two weeks, fought a duel in the Field of Forty Footsteps, and lost and won at the Cocoa Tree, between the lighting and snuffing of the candles, three thousand pounds.

Therefore it stood slightly in awe of the wit and manners and fine feathers, curled newest fashion, of its sometime friends and neighbors, and its welcome, if warm at heart, was stiff as cloth of gold with ceremony.  The May Queen tripped in her speech as she besought Mistress Evelyn to take the flower-wreathed great chair standing proudly forth from the humbler seats, and colored charmingly at the lady of fashion’s smiling shake of the head and few graceful words of homage.  The young men slyly noted the length of the Colonel’s periwig and the quality of Mr. Hayward’s Mechlin, while their elders, suddenly lacking material for discourse, made shift to take a deal of snuff.  The Colonel took matters into his own capable hands.

“Mr. Jaquelin, I wish that my tobacco at Westover may look as finely a fortnight hence as does yours to-day!  There promise to be more Frenchmen in my fields than Germans at St. James.  Mr. Gary, if I come to Denbigh when the peaches are ripe, will you teach me to make persico?  Mr. Allen, I hear that you breed cocks as courageous as those of Tanagra.  I shall borrow from you for a fight that I mean to give.  Ladies, for how much gold will you sell the recipe for that balm of Mecca you must use?