more hold on them than on some of the others; and to see the women lost to all sense of decency, with their petticoats girded high on account of the dew, striding among the plants with high flings of stalwart legs, then slashing right and left with an uncertainty of fury which threatened not only themselves but their neighbours as well as the tobacco, and shrieking now and then, regardless of who might hear, “Down with the king!”

Often one cut a finger, but went on with blood flowing, and their hair begun to fly loose, and they smeared their faces with their cut hands, and as for the two black women, they pounced upon those green plants with fierce swashes of their gleaming knives, and though they could have sensed little about the true reason for it all, worked with a fury of savagery which needed no motive only its first impetus of motion.

Captain Jaynes rode hither and thither striving to keep the mob in order, and enjoining silence upon them, and now and then lashing out with his long riding whip, but he had set forces in motion which he could not stop.  Fire and flood and wind and the passions of men, whether for love or rage, are beyond the leading of them who invoke them, being the instruments of the gods.

Sir Humphrey Hyde, who was beside me, slashing away at the plants, whispered:  “My God, Harry, how far will this fire which we have kindled spread?” but not in fear so much as amazement.

And I, bringing down a great ring of the green leaves, replied, and felt as I spoke as if some other than I had my tongue and my voice: 

“Maybe in the end, before it hath quite died out, to the destroying of tyranny and monarchy, and the clearing of the fields for a new government of equality and freedom.”

But Sir Humphrey stared at me.

“Sure,” he said, “it can do no more than to force the king to see that his colony hath grown from infancy to manhood, and hath an arm to be respected, and compel him to repeal the Navigation Act.  What else, Harry?”

Then I, speaking again as if some other moved my tongue, replied that none could say what matter a little fire kindleth, but those that came after us might know the result of that which we that night begun.

But Sir Humphrey shook his head.

“If but Nat Bacon were alive!” he sighed.  “No leader have we, Harry.  Oh, Harry, if thou wert not a convict!  Captain Jaynes is sure out of his element in defending the rights of the oppressed, and should be on his own quarter-deck with his cutlass in hand and his rapscallions around him, slaying and robbing, to be in full feather.  Naught can he do here.  Lord, hear those women shriek!  Why did they let women come hither, Harry?  Sure Nick Barry is in his cups.  Not thus would matters have been were Bacon alive.  The women would have been at home in their beds, and no man in liquor at work, for I trust not the militia.  Would Captain Bacon were alive, as he would have been, had he not been foully done to death.”