The tavern was a brick building abounding in sharp slants of roof, and dimmed in outline by a spreading cloud of new-leaved branches, and there was one great honey-locust which was a marvel to be seen, and hummed with bees with a mighty drone as of all the spinning-wheels in the country, and the sweetness of it blew down upon one passing under, like a wind of breath.  And before the tavern were tied, stamping and shaking their heads for the early flies, many fine horses, and among them Parson Downs’ and the Barry brothers’, and from within the tavern came the sound of laughter in discordant shouts, and now and then a snatch of a song.  Then a great hoarse rumble of voice would cap the rest, telling some loose story, then the laughter would follow—­enough, it seemed, to make the roof shake—­and all the time the hum of the bees in the honey-locust outside went on.  Verily at that time in Virginia, with all the spirit of the people in a ferment of rebellion against the established order of things, being that same ferment which the ardour of Nathaniel Bacon had set in motion, and which, so far as I see now, was the beginning of an epoch of history, there was nothing after all, no plotting nor counterplotting, no fierce inveighing against authority, nor reckless carousing on the brinks of precipices, which could for a second stay the march of the mightiest force of all—­the spring which had returned in its majesty of victory, for thousands of years, and love which had come before that.

I tied my horse with the others, with a tight halter, for he was apt to pick quarrels, having always a theory that such discomforts as flies or a long weariness of standing were in some fashion to be laid to the doors of other horses, and indeed made always of his own kind his special scapegoat of the dispensation of Providence.  ’Tis little I know about that great mystery of the animal creation and its relation toward the human race, but verily I believe that that fine horse of mine, from his propensity for kicking and lashing out from his iron-bound hoofs at whatever luckless steed came within his reach whenever the world went not to his liking, could not see an inch beyond the true horizon limit of the horse race, and attributed all that happened on earth, including man, to the agency of his own sort.  Sure I was, from the backward glance of viciousness which he cast at the other stamping steeds as soon as I dismounted, that he concluded with no hesitation they had in some way led me to ride him thither instead of to his snug berth in the Cavendish stables, with his eager nose in his feed trough.