Audrey

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? There are

dames at Court would come barefoot to Virginia for so dazzling a bloom.

Why do you patch only upon the Whig side of the face? Are you all of one

camp, and does not one of you grow a white rosebush against the 29th of

May? May it please your Majesty the May Queen, I shall watch the sports

from this seat upon your right hand. Egad, the miller quits himself as

though he were the moss-grown fellow of Sherwood Forest!"

The ice had thawed; and by the time the victorious miller had been pushed

forward to receive the smart cocked hat which was the Virginia rendition

of the crown of wild olive, it had quite melted. Conversation became

general, and food was found or made for laughter. When the twelve fiddlers

who succeeded the blacksmith and the miller came trooping upon the green,

they played, one by one, to perhaps as light-hearted a company as a May

Day ever shone upon. All their tunes were gay and lively ones, and the

younger men moved their feet to the music, while a Strephon at the lower

end of the lists seized upon a blooming Chloe, and the two began to dance

"as if," quoth the Colonel, "the musicians were so many tarantula

doctors."

A flower-wreathed instrument of his calling went to the player of the

sprightliest air; after which awardment, the fiddlers, each to the tune of

his own choosing, marched off the green to make room for Pretty Bessee,

her father the beggar, and her suitors the innkeeper, the merchant, the

gentleman, and the knight.