When about half-way to Drake Hill I heard afar off a great din of bells and horns and voices, which presently came nearer. Then the road was filled up with the dancing May revellers, and verily I wondered not so much at those decrees against such practices before the Restoration, for it was as if the savages which they do say are underneath the outer gloss of the best of us had broke loose, and I wondered if it might not be like those mad and unlawful orgies which it was said the god Pan led himself in person through Thessalian groves. Those honest country maids, who in the morning had advanced with rustic but innocent freedom, with their glossy heads crowned with flowers, and those lusty youths, who were indeed something boisterous, yet still held in a tight rein by decency, had seemingly changed their very natures, or rather, perhaps, had come to that pass when their natures could be no longer concealed. Along the road in the white moonlight they stamped as wantonly as any herd of kine; youths and maids with arms about each other, and all with faces flushed with ale-drinking, and the maids with tossing hair and draggled coats, and all the fresh garlands withered or scattered. And the old graybeard who was Maid Marion was riotously drunk, and borne aloft with mad and feeble gesturings on the shoulders of two staggering young men, and after him came the aged morris dancers, only upheld from collapse in the mire by mutual upholdings, until they seemed like some monstrous animal moving with uncouth sprawls of legs as multifold as a centipede, and wavering drunkenly from one side of the road to the other, lurching into the dewy bushes, then recovering by the joint effort of the whole.
I stood well back to let them pass, being in that mood of self-importance, by reason of my love and the service rendered by it, that I could have seen the whole posse led to the whipping-block with a relish, when suddenly from their tipsy throats came a shout of such import that my heart stood still. “Down with the king!” hallooed one mad reveller, in a voice of such thickness that the whole sentence seemed one word; then the others took it up, until verily it seemed to me that their heads were not worth a farthing. Then, “Down with the governor! down with Lord Culpeper!” shouted that same thick voice of the man who was leading the wild crew like a bell-wether. He forged ahead, something more steady on his legs, but all the madder of his wits for that, with an arm around the waist of a buxom lass on either side, and all three dancing in time. Then all the rest echoed that shout of “Down with the governor!” Then out he burst again with, “Down, down with the tobacco, down with the tobacco!” But the volley of that echo was cut short by five horsemen galloping after the throng and scattering them to the right and left. Then a great voice of authority, set out with the strangest oaths which ever an imagination of evil compassed, called out to them to be still if they valued their